BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong levels of credibility that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
