British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to air a evening statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's statement stated: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a position in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
