BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, States UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's announcement stated: "Our investigation determined that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the voice and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
