British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".

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

The authority has instructed the corporation to air a evening statement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the statement read.

'Risk to Undermine Confidence'

The regulator's announcement declared: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's parent served in a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was significantly deceptive.

"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.

"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.

"This error had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an internal BBC review determined it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A BBC spokesperson stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."