British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says UK Media Regulator

The public service broadcaster committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time statement about its findings.

"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Damage Confidence'

The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent served in a post in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.

"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the details he shared.

"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This error had the potential to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."