British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the BBC to air a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to undermine the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
