British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to 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 chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The authority's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
