BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our probe determined that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."
