British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable levels of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
