British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to erode the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret 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."