British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
