British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and language are finalised."
