BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Media Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
