British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report said: "Our probe found that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
