Latest news with #HoyoFilms
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
How BBC's Gaza documentary ‘scandal' highlights criticism of its war coverage
A BBC documentary about Gaza has come under fire for reportedly breaching editorial guidelines on accuracy, 'by failing to disclose the [film's] narrator was the son of a Hamas official,' according to the news organisation's review. On Monday (July 14), it found that the independent production company, Hoyo Films, bears 'most of the responsibility for the failure', adding that the BBC also 'bore some responsibility and should have done more in its oversight.' Here is what to know. What is the film in question? GAZA: HOW TO SURVIVE A WARZONE was released on the BBC's UK-specific video and streaming service, iPlayer, in February this year. Its description on the film database website IMDb says, 'Following the lives of four young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire – a vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone.' However, it was pulled from the platform days later. At the centre of the controversy is a 13-year-old boy named Abdullah al Yazouri, featured in the film. The BBC only later 'discovered' that he was the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza, in the Hamas government. Hamas is the militant Palestinian organisation that came to power in the enclave in 2006, following elections. It went to war with the rival organisation Fatah, after the latter refused to accept its victory. Since then, Hamas has controlled Gaza while the Palestinian Authority (PA) controls the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Countries like the United Kingdom and the United States have classified Hamas as a terrorist organisation. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched strikes against Israel that killed over 1,200 people and abducted around 250 others. Israel almost immediately launched a brutal military response in Gaza, which has continued to date. Major cities have been flattened, and over 58,000 people have been killed (a majority being women and children), according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. So, what did the BBC find? The BBC said it had not been informed of the family connection in advance by the film's production company. The review found that three members of the production company knew of the father's position. Peter Johnston, Director of Editorial Complaints & Reviews, wrote in the review report that the BBC team had not been 'sufficiently proactive' with initial editorial checks. The UK's media watchdog Ofcom has now said it will conduct its own investigation to ensure that 'factual programmes must not materially mislead the audience.' Notably, Johnston wrote, 'I do not consider that anything in the Narrator's scripted contribution to the Programme breached the BBC's standards on due impartiality. The content of the narration is factual and carries balance where required.' There was no evidence to suggest that the narrator's family influenced the film, he added. The BBC said it was taking several steps to prevent a similar breach being repeated. Hoyo Films said it took the review findings 'extremely seriously' and that it 'apologises for the mistake that resulted in a breach of the editorial guidelines'. In early July, the BBC was also criticised for allowing the punk group Bob Vylan's performance at the Glastonbury Festival to continue streaming online. The duo chanted 'death to the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces)' and 'Free, free Palestine' during their set. What is the fallout so far? The NGO Campaign Against Antisemitism said the BBC's recommendations were 'frankly insulting'. More than 40 Jewish television executives, including a former BBC content chief and JK Rowling's agent, Neil Blair, previously wrote to the BBC with questions about editorial failings surrounding the film. More broadly, the media organisation is being criticised for keeping its viewers in the dark, leading to allegations of bias. However, the BBC has also been criticised in recent months for a skewed coverage of the events unfolding in Gaza by another group of people. Earlier this month, more than 120 BBC employees anonymously wrote an open letter to the management, signed by other media professionals. That letter came after the BBC restricted another Gaza-related documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire. 'We're writing to express our concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine… It demonstrates, once again, that the BBC is not reporting 'without fear or favour' when it comes to Israel.' The letter added, 'A recent statement from the BBC said broadcasting the film 'risked creating the perception of partiality'. This illustrates precisely what many of us have experienced first hand: an organisation that is crippled by the fear of being perceived as critical of the Israeli government.' It said senior BBC staffers often made decisions without discussion or explanation. 'As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government's involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications. These stories have instead been broken by the BBC's competitors,' it added. 'This hasn't happened by accident, rather by design. Much of the BBC's coverage in this area is defined by anti-Palestinian racism… All too often it has felt that the BBC has been performing PR for the Israeli government and military. This should be a cause of great shame and concern for everyone at the BBC.' Finally, it called on the BBC to 'do better for our audiences and recommit to our values of impartiality, honesty and reporting without fear or favour.'
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
The BBC has alienated everyone with its Gaza coverage. After this latest failure, who will be left to defend it?
For a genocide to occur, everything that people think is wrong has to first be turned on its head. There have been endless examples of this gruesome phenomenon in the past 21 months; Monday's report on the BBC's scrapped documentary about the plight of children in Gaza is just the latest instance. Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was a rare example of the unbearable experiences of Palestinians being properly investigated by Britain's public broadcaster. But within the media, this documentary has become a bigger scandal than the suffering of Palestinian children. When a researcher named David Collier, who has written widely in defence of Israel, discovered that the 13-year-old narrator of the film, Abdullah, was the son of the deputy agriculture minister in Hamas's government, all hell broke loose. After a deafening chorus of condemnation from pro-Israel lobby groups, British newspapers and the government, the documentary was taken off iPlayer. Monday's review states that the failure to disclose this connection violated the BBC's editorial guidelines, which stipulate that the corporation must 'provide full transparency to its audience'. But it concludes that Hoyo Films, the independent production company that made the film, did not intentionally mislead the BBC. It says Hoyo's view had been – rightly – that Abdullah's father had a 'civilian or technocratic' position within Hamas as opposed to a political or military role, and that it had simply 'made a mistake' in not informing the BBC. Here is the crucial point. All of Abdullah's words were scripted by the production company, since he was the narrator. The report '[does] not consider that anything in the narrator's scripted contribution to the programme breached the BBC's standards on due impartiality', and found no evidence that Abdullah's father or family influenced the script in any way. In other words, it was completely irrelevant who his father was. There was no substantial justification for taking this documentary off air. The immediate repercussions were that the young narrator and his family were inundated with abuse and harassment, with Abdullah declaring that the BBC was to blame if anything happened to him. Such fear is hardly baseless: thousands of children have been slaughtered by Israeli troops, including the 12-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, one of the only witnesses to Israel's killing of paramedics and first responders in March. In the past few days, Israeli forces have killed Palestinian children waiting to collect nutritional supplements and others waiting for water. The latter incident, they claimed, was a 'technical error'. Is this the explanation for how one of the world's most sophisticated militaries, with technology allowing it to know exactly who it is about to kill in its strikes, has plausibly killed tens of thousands of children since October 2023? Still, in Britain there is infinitely more scrutiny of this documentary than of these historic crimes. The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has even demanded to know why no one has been sacked at the BBC after its decision to air the documentary. In Nandy's upside-down world, a single detail in a documentary that exposes the killing of children should destroy careers. What about her colleagues who have supported the continued supply of military equipment for Israeli forces as they commit a livestreamed genocide? The media backlash against this documentary prompted the BBC to pause another documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which investigated Israeli attempts to destroy Gaza's healthcare system (so far, this has killed at least 1,580 healthcare workers). The BBC pulled the film despite it having been approved at every level, with no factual objections to anything in it (the documentary was ultimately broadcast on Channel 4). According to Ben de Pear, the documentary's executive producer and a former Channel 4 news editor who wrote about the decision in the Observer, BBC script meetings were dominated by discussions about potential objections from Collier and the lobby group Camera. Collier's pro-Israel social media output is instructive: he has written that 'Jewish people have every reason to see the Palestinian flag as a flag of genocidal hate', and that 'the Palestinian identity, and especially the 'refugees' were developed ONLY as a weapon against Israel'. The furore has been used to justify the idea that the BBC is biased against Israel, yet the exact opposite is true. In a damning report, the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring found that the BBC gave Israeli deaths far more coverage in its articles when measured on a per-fatality basis – and using the overly conservative official Gaza death toll. The vast majority of emotive words, such as 'massacre', 'atrocities', 'slaughter', 'barbaric' and 'brutal', were reserved for Israeli victims. Israeli voices were heard far more often than those of Palestinians. This has angered many within the BBC, too, who want to report fairly on the conflict: more than 100 have signed a letter criticising the choice not to air Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. Meanwhile, the historic context for Israel's crimes against Palestinians has been ignored and erased. The numerous statements of genocidal and criminal intent by Israeli leaders have barely been acknowledged. Like other western media outlets, the BBC has stripped Palestinian lives of their worth, ignored and whitewashed Israeli crimes and repeatedly treated Israeli denials of atrocities as credible, even when those denials are repeatedly exposed as lies. Morality has been turned on its head. The BBC must be perceived as pro-Israel, despite the overwhelming evidence of its crimes. The scandals must be reserved for documentaries about Palestinians, rather than the horrors those Palestinians endure. But here lies the problem. Thanks not least to the work of Palestinian journalists, much of the world has already witnessed the atrocities that are being committed by the Israeli state. They can see the mismatch between what they know to be true and what media outlets such as the BBC report. The BBC has alienated its natural supporters and is detested by the right because it's a public broadcaster. Its journalistic failures in the Conservative years increasingly undermined faith in its editorial standards. Now, its failure to accurately report on the great crime of our age has only deepened that outrage. Who, then, will be left to defend this ailing beast? Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Time of India
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
BBC Gaza documentary: Review finds editorial failures; Ofcom launches own investigation
A report commissioned by BBC director-general Tim Davie has concluded that the Gaza documentary 'How to Survive a Warzone' breached editorial standards and that oversight failures occurred before it was pulled from iPlayer in February. The independent producer, Hoyo Films, was found primarily responsible, although the BBC accepted that its own checks fell short. Oversight failures and mistakes The review revealed that three Hoyo staff were aware the narrator's father held the position of deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run Gaza government. This crucial detail had not been disclosed to the BBC. The report criticised the BBC for not undertaking 'sufficiently proactive' editorial checks and highlighted a 'lack of critical oversight of unanswered or partially answered questions' before broadcast. It also concluded that while the narrator's scripted part did not breach impartiality, using a child narrator was 'not appropriate' under the circumstances. Ofcom launches investigation Broadcast regulator Ofcom has announced its own inquiry, stating it will investigate whether the documentary misleadingly presented facts, in breach of rules requiring factual content to be accurate. 'Having examined the BBC's findings, we are launching an investigation under our rule which states that factual programmes must not materially mislead the audience," an Ofcom spokesperson was quoted as saying to the BBC. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like An engineer reveals: One simple trick to get internet without a subscription Techno Mag Learn More Undo BBC's response BBC News CEO Deborah Turness told Radio 4's The World at One that the organisation is 'owning where we have made mistakes, finding out what went wrong, acting on the findings, and we've said we're sorry.' She said that BBC staff overseeing the documentary 'should have known about the boy's position before transmission.' The BBC has introduced new steps to improve oversight after the review. These include creating a new director role on the BBC News board to oversee long documentaries, issuing fresh guidance to check narrators more carefully in sensitive news programmes, and starting a new approval process to spot any problems before programmes are made. Director‑general Tim Davie acknowledged 'a significant failing in relation to accuracy' and said the BBC would pursue accountability and implement reforms immediately. He added: 'We will now take action on two fronts. Fair, clear and appropriate actions to ensure proper accountability and the immediate implementation of steps to prevent such errors being repeated.' Hoyo Films responds Hoyo Films issued an apology and said it took the reviewer's findings 'extremely seriously'. It welcomed evidence showing 'no inappropriate influence on the content of the documentary from any third party' and said it would collaborate with the BBC to possibly re-edit some material for archive purposes. Media watchdog against antisemitism criticised the BBC's reforms as insufficient, saying: 'The report says nothing we didn't already know… The report yields no new insight, and almost reads like it's trying to exonerate the BBC.' The review was conducted by Peter Johnston, the BBC's director of editorial complaints and reviews, who examined around 5,000 documents and 150 hours of footage from the ten‑month production.
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
BBC documentary breaches editorial guidelines over Hamas link, says review
A BBC documentary showcasing the lives of children in war-torn Gaza recently came under fire after a report found that it had breached editorial guidelines on accuracy as it failed to disclose that the narrator was the son of a Hamas official. The documentary 'Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone', was removed by the broadcaster from its streaming service in February, following revelations that its 13-year-old narrator, Abdullah, was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, a Hamas official who served as the deputy minister of agriculture. A review found that the independent production company, Hoyo Films, responsible for creating the documentary, did not share the 'critical information' of the narrator's family background with the BBC before broadcast. The probe concluded that Hoyo Films bore the majority of the responsibility for this oversight, although it was deemed unintentional. Following the controversy, Britain's media regulator Ofcom said that it would launch an investigation into the matter and probe the documentary under a specific rule that mandates factual programmes to avoid 'materially misleading the audience'. 'Regardless of how the significance or otherwise of the Narrator's father's position was judged, the audience should have been informed about this,' said the report by Peter Johnston, BBC Director of Editorial Complaints and Reviews. BBC Director-General Tim Davie said that the report had identified a crucial failing concerning accuracy. 'We will now take action on two fronts – fair, clear and appropriate actions to ensure proper accountability and the immediate implementation of steps to prevent such errors being repeated,' Davie said in a statement. Will 'improve processes and prevent similar problems', says Hoyo Films After courting controversy over the documentary, the production company Hoyo Films released a statement apologising for the breach and affirmed its commitment to 'improve processes and prevent similar problems'. 'We take the findings in Peter Johnston's report on Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone extremely seriously and apologise for the mistake that resulted in a breach of the (BBC) editorial guidelines,' the statement read. 'We are pleased that the report found that there was no evidence of inappropriate influence on the content of the documentary from any third party. We appreciate the rigorous nature of this investigation, and its findings that Hoyo Films did not intentionally mislead the BBC, that there were no other breaches of the editorial guidelines in the programme, and that there was no evidence to suggest that the programme funds were spent other than for reasonable, production-related purposes,' it said. 'Hoyo Films welcomes the report's recommendations and hope they will improve processes and prevent similar problems in the future. We are working closely with the BBC to see if we can find an appropriate way to bring back to iPlayer the stories of those featured in the programme,' the statement added. 'We didn't run those questions to ground, ' says BBC News chief Chief executive of BBC News and Current Affairs Deborah Turness, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, said the broadcaster has taken the matter 'incredibly seriously' and it will share the action plan that has been put in place in order to ensure that this kind of 'mistake' does not happen again. 'We've said we're sorry, and I am sorry,' Turness said. 'At BBC News, we are fully accountable,' she said. 'And we didn't run those questions to ground.' 'Yes, they should have known because their questions should have been answered at the many times of asking' by the production company, she added. The BBC's coverage of the war has faced intense scrutiny, with critics on both sides – pro-Israel and anti-Israel – accusing the broadcaster of failing to strike the right balance. (With inputs from BBC, Reuters and AP)
New York Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
BBC's Gaza documentary narrated by Hamas official's teen son violated editorial guidelines, probe finds
A BBC documentary about the Gaza war's effect on children breached editorial guidelines — and is being probed by Britain's media watchdog — for not disclosing that its teen narrator was the son of a Hamas official. 'Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone' breached editorial guidelines on accuracy when it aired in February because narrator Abdullah, 13, is the son of Hyman Alyazouri, deputy minister of agriculture under the terror group, a BBC internal review determined Monday. 4 'Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone' breached editorial guidelines on accuracy when it aired in February, a BBC review determined. BBC 'The review found that the independent production company, Hoyo Films, bears most of the responsibility for the failure,' the broadcaster said Monday, while admitting it also 'bore some responsibility' and should have had more oversight. Three Hoyo Films employees knew of Alyazouri's ties to Hamas, but did not alert the broadcaster before the film aired, according to the BBC review. The film company was asked in writing 'a number of times' about any potential ties Abdullah and his family had to the terrorists, a BBC spokesperson told The Post in March. 4 The film company was asked in writing 'a number of times' about any potential ties Abdullah and his family had to the terrorists. AP Hoyo only made the revelation after the documentary was released, the rep said, adding that the production company allegedly paid the boy's mother a 'limited sum of money.' However, the BBC said its review found no proof 'to support the suggestion that the narrator's father or family influenced the content of the program in any way.' 4 Hoyo only made the revelation after the documentary was released, the rep said. BBC After the BBC released its findings, Britain's Office of Communications, or Ofcom, announced it would conduct its own review 'under our rule which states the factual programs must not mislead the audience.' The investigation comes just two weeks after the BBC aired an antisemitic livestream from punk-rap band Bob Vylan's performance at the Glastonbury Festival on June 28. 4 BBC said its review found no proof 'to support the suggestion that the narrator's father or family influenced the content of the program in any way.' BBC The company, which streams the annual event, later admitted that it should have cut the feed after the London-based duo spewed hateful rhetoric and urged the massive crowd to chant 'Death to the IDF,' in reference to the Israel Defense Forces. The US pulled Bob Vylan's visas after the stunt. The group had a 20-show American tour slated to kick off in October. With Post wires
