British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
