BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's announcement stated: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
