British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found 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 truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's report said: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's parent held a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are determined."
