British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
