BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to erode the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
