BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to transmit a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The authority's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the significantly high degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
