British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's report stated: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential 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The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement 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 factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
