BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Media Rules, States Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film 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 concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The authority's statement stated: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
