British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Standards, States Ofcom
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's father occupied a position in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."