BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to air a evening statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
