BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into 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, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
