BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
