British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to air a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
