BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
