BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable levels of trust that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
