British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's family links emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
