BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
