British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in July an internal BBC review determined it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
