British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong levels of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
