British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Standards, Declares Ofcom
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong levels of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
