BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Violation of Media Rules, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to air a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The authority's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a position in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a television network and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
