British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong levels of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
