BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
