British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and language are finalised."
