British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
