BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom
The BBC committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a television network and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
