British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Violation of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's statement stated: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to undermine the significantly high degrees of credibility that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
