BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "Our probe determined that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the online platform in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
