British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent served in a position in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the boy's family links came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
