British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our probe found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a role in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions 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 authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
