BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Breach 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 voice of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable levels of trust that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
