BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to air a evening statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our investigation found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
