British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, States Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of trust that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
