British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."