British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable levels of credibility that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."