BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
