BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement stated: "Our probe determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
