British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog

The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a film about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".

The regulator has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.

'Risk to Damage Credibility'

The authority's report said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.

"Trust is at the core of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.

A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 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 schedule and language are finalised."