British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable levels of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the boy's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are finalised."