British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father held a role in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the voice and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
