British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to transmit a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it violated the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
