BBC Gaza Film Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog

The British broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

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

The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its findings.

"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.

'Possibility to Undermine Trust'

The regulator's statement stated: "Our investigation determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.

"It meant that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.

"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.

"This error had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The programme was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the narrator's family links came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."