BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.
"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father held a position in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and language are finalised."
