British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the very considerable levels of trust that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
