British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The authority's statement stated: "Our probe determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
