BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the very considerable levels of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
