British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
