BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
