THE BBC’s claim that it axed plans to show a documentary about medics in Gaza over “perceived partiality” is not true, producers of the film have said.
Journalists Ramita Navai and Ben de Pear, who produced Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, revealed details behind the BBC’s decision not to go ahead with the documentary while writing for the Observer.
The BBC is alleged to have dropped the film seven weeks before issuing the statement claiming it had only recently been cut over comments from Navai. However, Navai claimed the BBC had only been planning to show short clips of the documentary at that point.
After it was repeatedly delayed and then dropped by the BBC, Channel 4 aired the film on medics under attack in Gaza instead.
Produced by Basement Films, it shows the plight of medics in Gaza through witness accounts from frontline Palestinian health workers and documents the attacks on hospitals and clinics.
And now, Navai and de Pear have said that the BBC blocked the documentary on six separate occasions.
The journalists alleged that the BBC had held script meetings at which concerns about prominent pro-Israel social media outfits "dominated", and that the broadcaster had asked for testimony from captured Palestinian hospital directors to be included, despite allegations that would breach both the Ofcom code and the Geneva convention for the "use of interviews with prisoners under duress".
The pair further claimed that the reason the broadcaster gave for the delays was an internal investigation over another documentary, How to Survive a Warzone.
The BBC launched the probe after it emerged that the film was narrated by a child of a Hamas official, which was not addressed in the documentary.
This ongoing saga led the BBC to become “anxious” over showing another film on Gaza and executives “inadvertently” leading them on, the journalists said.
In June, the BBC said it had “reached the end of the road” in discussions to find a way to air the documentary.
"We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC,” they said.
"Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world’s most trusted broadcaster."
The producers of the film have disputed this.
“This was not true; it had dropped the film seven weeks earlier and at this point was only planning to show short clips of it,” they said.
In response to the BBC claiming it had “no choice” but to walk away from the documentary, they said: “To be clear, what it was abandoning by this point was three one-minute clips.”
It also emerged BBC bosses had attempted to downgrade Navai’s role as correspondent to a “contributor or third party reporter”.
“Eventually, we were told some of Ramita’s tweets had been ‘one-sided’,” the journalists wrote.
“There had been too many retweets of posts by organisations reporting the deaths and suffering of Palestinians and not supportive enough of the other side, they said.”
They were then told this decision came from the “top of BBC News, and of the BBC itself”.
The BBC did not deny this and claimed there were “concerns about some of Ms Navai’s social media activity”.
The broadcaster had also attempted to introduce a “gagging clause” during negotiations over releasing the film back to the producers.
De Pear and Navai said it stipulated that “neither we nor any third party buying the film would issue any disparaging statements about the BBC and/or “do not suggest or imply that any version of the programme (a) was authorised or approved by the BBC, or (b) would not be broadcast or published by the BBC”.
The BBC denied this was a gagging clause, but the producers refused to sign it.
