BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom

The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.

An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".

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

The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its findings.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.

'Risk to Erode Credibility'

The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.

"Trust is at the core of the connection between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This oversight had the risk to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.

A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."