British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of trust that the public would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."