British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom

The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".

The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Potential to Undermine Trust'

The authority's statement stated: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.

"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he provided.

"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.

"This oversight had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was pulled from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."