BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
