British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
