British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant 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 determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a evening announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are directing the BBC to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."
