British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
