British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are directing the corporation to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe determined that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
