BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."
