British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.

"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.

'Risk to Damage Confidence'

The authority's statement declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a position in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.

"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he presented.

"Trust is at the center of the bond between a television network and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This error had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."

The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."