British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to undermine the significantly high levels of trust that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's personal associations emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
