BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's statement stated: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the significantly high levels of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the online platform in last February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."
