BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
