British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation determined that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's father occupied a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 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 sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
