BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
