BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the BBC to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review determined it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance 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 factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are determined."
