BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's father served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
