BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the center 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 possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
