BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, States Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it violated the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to 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 comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
