British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, 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 film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a evening statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."
