British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom
The BBC committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the voice and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to erode the significantly high degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
