British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
