British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Media Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog

The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.

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

The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Possibility to Damage Trust'

The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.

"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he shared.

"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's personal associations emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

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