British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to broadcast a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the connection between a television network and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
