British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the corporation to air a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
