British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".

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

The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.

"It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.

"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's family links emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."