BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom

The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".

The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a evening statement about its findings.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Erode Credibility'

The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.

"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.

"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."

The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

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