British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
