British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to air a evening announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
