BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, States UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled government 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.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
