BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Violation of Media Standards, Declares Ofcom
The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's report said: "Our probe determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable amounts of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
