British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's statement said: "Our probe found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
