British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's report said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong levels of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it violated 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 aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
