BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government 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 provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
