British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a prime-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our probe found that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the online platform in last February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
