British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Breach of Media Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that viewers would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
