British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father held a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it breached the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."