BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
