British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong levels of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
