British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's report said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to damage the significantly high degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed 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 corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
