British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation determined that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."
