BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it violated the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
