BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a role in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong levels of trust that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
