British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
