British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are determined."
