BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry 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 major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our investigation determined that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
