British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to air a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
