BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error 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 expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
