BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Media Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in February after the boy's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."