BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice 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 determined that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
