BBC Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the boy's family links came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
