British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the very considerable levels of credibility that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
