British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our investigation determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
