British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, States Ofcom
The BBC engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was pulled from the online platform in last February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
