BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The watchdog's report said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
