British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
