British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
