British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Media Regulations, Says Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
