British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Media Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to air a evening declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father occupied a position in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"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 timing and wording are confirmed."