British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
