British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the BBC to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
