British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Media Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."