British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to transmit a evening statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a post in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
