British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
