British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in line 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 accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
