British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
