British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Media Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
