BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the corporation to broadcast a evening announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line 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 corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
