British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to air a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
