British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
