BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from the online platform in February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
