British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
