British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the BBC to air a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's report said: "Our probe found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
