British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
