BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the corporation to air a evening announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father occupied a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
