BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog 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, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that the public would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
