British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to transmit a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the corporation to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's report declared: "Our investigation found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
