British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's report stated: "Our probe found that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."