British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom
The BBC committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's statement said: "Our probe determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
