A senior BBC News executive has said the broadcaster “failed” to ask the right questions regarding the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone.
It comes after a report looking into the documentary, which was removed from BBC iPlayer in February after it emerged that the child narrator was the son of a Hamas official, found that it breached BBC editorial guidelines on accuracy.
The review, published on Monday, was conducted by Peter Johnston, the director of editorial complaints and reviews which is independent of BBC News, and found that the programme was in breach of accuracy for “failing to disclose information about the child narrator’s father’s position within the Hamas-run government”.
It did not, however, find any other breaches of editorial guidelines, including breaches of impartiality, and also found no evidence that “outside interests” “inappropriately impacted on the programme”.
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Speaking on BBC’s Radio 4 World At One programme, Deborah Turness, chief executive of BBC News, said: “Our current affairs teams, day in, day out, week in, week out, are creating and pushing out incredibly controversial, difficult, complex documentaries.
“We have really good, best-in-class systems in place, but in this we failed, and we must put in place new processes which will enable us to continue with our courageous journalism with confidence.”
She also added: “It’s about accountability. And I think what you can see today is that the BBC has taken this incredibly seriously. We have led a full and thorough investigation, which we are publishing full and transparently.
“Everything is out there, and we share the action plan that we’re now putting into place to prevent this kind of mistake happening again.
“We are responsible for everything that we publish and everything we broadcast. We take it incredibly seriously, and we didn’t run those questions to ground.”
Ms Turness also addressed a second Gaza documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which was originally commissioned by the broadcaster from an independent production company called Basement Films.
However, the corporation delayed airing it until the review into Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone was released.
The documentary, which includes witness accounts from frontline Palestinian health workers in Gaza and documents attacks on hospitals and clinics, was later pulled entirely and aired on Channel 4 earlier this month.
Ms Turness said: “We want to tell the stories of Gaza. We are telling the stories of Gaza.
“We’ve got long form projects in the pipeline. We are covering Gaza, and we’re covering it with courage and without fear or favour.
“During that production, the BBC raised concerns around the social media activity of one of the journalists. Obviously, we are incredibly protective and conscious of our impartiality and our very high standards of impartiality, and we were concerned about the activity of the journalist concerned.
“We decided, in the light of those concerns, that we would pause broadcast of that documentary while waiting to see what the Peter Johnston report would bring us.
“The film company weren’t happy with that pause, and they wanted the journalism to air sooner. So we were trying to find a way around that, trying to find a way without airing the documentary, to put the journalism and the voice of the doctors on our platforms.
“And then came a moment where the lead journalist went on the Today programme to talk about Israel’s attacks on Iran and used language around Israel that was really not compatible with the BBC standards of impartiality and made it impossible for us to continue with the project.
“It was very difficult to imagine that it could meet the BBC standards of impartiality, and that it would have created at least a perception of partiality, had we aired it.
“And the right thing to do at that time was to walk away, because no BBC journalist could have said what that journalist said on air, and therefore we have to apply some of the same standards to those who work with us from the outside.” – PA
