British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's father served in a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
