BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry 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, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the corporation to air a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's announcement stated: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, 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 the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
