BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's report said: "Our probe found that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to erode the very considerable levels of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
