British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
