British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to transmit a evening statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
