British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's report stated: "Our investigation determined that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are finalised."
