BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
