British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
