BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe found that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
