British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator

The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

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

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

The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its findings.

"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to air a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," it said.

'Possibility to Damage Credibility'

The authority's statement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.

"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he presented.

"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in February after the boy's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the organization's content policies on accuracy.

A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."