British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the corporation to broadcast a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's report stated: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
