British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has directed the BBC to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
