British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares Ofcom
The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
