BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator

The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

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

The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".

Ofcom has directed the corporation to air a peak-time statement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.

'Potential to Erode Credibility'

The authority's report declared: "Our probe found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.

"Consequently that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the information he shared.

"Confidence is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."

The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the boy's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's content policies on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."