British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog

The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "substantially inaccurate".

The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".

The regulator has directed the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.

"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.

"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's content policies on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme 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 agree with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."