BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to 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 adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
