British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to broadcast a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The authority's report said: "Our probe concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's family links emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
