British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
