British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
