British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's announcement declared: "Our probe determined that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the very considerable levels of trust that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
