British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable levels of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
