BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's announcement stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to damage the significantly high amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"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 determined."
