British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the corporation to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
