BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Breach of Media Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
