BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
