British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a evening declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's report stated: "Our probe determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."