British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the corporation to air a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
