British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from the online platform in February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
