BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Breach of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to air a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to damage the significantly high amounts of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
