British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent held a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson 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 corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
