British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Regulations, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father held a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
