British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a evening declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable levels of credibility that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 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 comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
