British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to air a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
