British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."
