British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The regulator's report said: "Our investigation found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
