BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the very considerable levels of credibility that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."
