British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's report said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
