BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
