British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
