BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."