British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are finalised."
