British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
