BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Regulations, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
