BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father occupied a position in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
