British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable levels of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
