British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom 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, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are directing the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The authority's report declared: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
