British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, States UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's family links came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
