British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement stated: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a position in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in last February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
