British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the BBC to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it breached the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
