British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the BBC to transmit a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The authority's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a television network and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
