British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog

The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.

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

The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".

The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its findings.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.

'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'

The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.

"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.

"Trust is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."

The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.

A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."