British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father served in a position in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
