British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe found that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public 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 core of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."