‘BBC’ admits one ethics failure in nixed Gaza feature

A BBC report published Monday confirmed the existence of an ethical and editorial issue in a documentary about Gaza that the broadcaster had pulled offline in February, but claimed this was the result of an honest mistake by an external production firm.

The 31-page review by Peter Johnston, director of the BBC’s Editorial Complaints and Reviews department, upheld complaints of misleading audiences of the documentary film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” due to the fact that its main narrator, a boy named Abdullah, was later found to be the son of a Hamas government official, Ayman Alyazouri, deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas-run Gaza government.

The London-based production company Hoto Films, which produced the documentary for the BBC, “had to bring this information to the BBC’s attention” but did not and is therefore “the party with most responsibility for this failure,” Johnston wrote.

“However, I do not consider that the production company intentionally misled the BBC about the narrator’s father’s position,” he added. Rather, it believed that the father’s position “was a civilian or technocratic one, as opposed to a political or military position in Hamas,” Johnston added. The issue is “a breach of Guideline 3.3.17 on Accuracy, which deals with misleading audiences,” he added.

“This is the only breach of the [BBC] Editorial Guidelines I have identified in connection with the Programme,” wrote Johnston.

All mentions in Arabic of the word “Jew” were translated in the film as “Israeli,” but this was not in breach of the guidelines, Johnston wrote, as Gazans often refer to the IDF this way. “Translating a contributor’s words to give the impression they meant to refer to Jewish people generally would therefore also risk misleading audiences,” he claimed.

“I do not find there to have been any editorial breaches in respect of the Programme’s translation; but I do find that guidance on this topic could be clarified and not just based on previous rulings, as explained further below,” he also said.

The inquiry found that the production firm provided payment to the tune of $2,448, and that this was “reasonable.” An adult earning an average salary in Gaza in 2021 would need to work for 21 months to earn that sum, according to U.N. data. Wages likely dropped even further following the outbreak of war with Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which eliminated many places of employment.

Johnston also wrote that he had “not seen or heard any evidence to support a suggestion that the Narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the Programme in any way.”

David Collier, an independent British journalist who exposed the family ties of the narrator Abdullah, dismissed the inquiry’s findings as insufficient and criticized the latter assertion.

“They didn’t find evidence to suggest ‘daddy’ had any input. Seriously? He only went home to his Hamas daddy EVERY NIGHT,” Collier wrote on X.

© JNS