British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Media Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's statement stated: "Our probe found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
