BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."