British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Violation of Media Rules, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the online platform in February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
