British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
