BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the online platform in last February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are finalised."
