British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a television network and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
