British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Ofcom

The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.

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

The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.

"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Potential to Damage Trust'

The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the film's failure to disclose that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.

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

"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This error had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and language are finalised."