British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, States UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
