Ofcom has confirmed that the BBC made a ‘serious breach of their rules’ over a documentary about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was originally released in February this year, following the lives of four young people living in the warzone in Gaza.
The documentary was narrated by a 13-year-old boy, who was later discovered to be the son of a Hamas official.
In a new statement released today, Ofcom outlined: ‘As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed.’
The media regulator stated that the documentary ‘broke broadcasting rules which state that factual programmes must not materially mislead the audience’.
The statement continued: ‘Our investigation found that the programme’s failure to disclose that the narrator’s father held a position in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
‘It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he provided.’
Ofcom emphasised that ‘trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC’.
Therefore, the broadcaster’s failure to disclose the connection that the narrator has to Hamas ‘had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war’.
On Ofcom’s website, it says that the watchdog ‘may impose a sanction if we consider that a broadcaster has seriously, deliberately, repeatedly or recklessly breached one of our requirements’.
In a statement, a BBC spokesperson said that the broadcaster ‘accepts Ofcom’s decision in full’.
They said: ‘The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston’s review that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy, which reflects rule 2.2 of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code.
‘We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom’s decision in full.
‘We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised.’
In July this year, the BBC published the findings of an internal review that was conducted into the film.
The findings stated that the failure to disclose the narrator’s father’s position within the Hamas-run administration ‘was a breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines’, and specifically a breach of the guideline ‘which deals with misleading audiences’.
Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was made for the BBC by independent production company HOYO Films.
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