BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Media Standards, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza 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 concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to air a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the connection between a television network and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
