British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
