BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Media Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a position in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
