BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Media Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The authority's report declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-administered administration 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 shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
