British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

An investigation by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme 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".

The regulator has instructed the BBC to transmit a peak-time announcement about its findings.

"As this represents a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Risk to Damage Confidence'

The watchdog's announcement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's male guardian held a position in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.

"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he shared.

"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.

"This error had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."