British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's father served in a role in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to erode the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
