British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
