BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to 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 follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are determined."
