British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to air a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The authority's announcement stated: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong levels of credibility that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
