BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the significantly high levels of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
