British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of confidence that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
