British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a television network and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to erode the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
