British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
