British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
