BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.

An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".

The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".

The regulator has directed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Potential to Undermine Credibility'

The authority's statement said: "Our probe found that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.

"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he presented.

"Trust is at the core of the bond between a television network and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This error had the possibility to damage the very considerable levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.

A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in line with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."