BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the corporation to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
