BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a evening statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a television network and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."