BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the significantly high degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "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 accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
