British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Media Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
