British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to air a evening announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film 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 accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
