BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator

The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.

An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening statement about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Erode Trust'

The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the voice's father occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.

"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the voice and the details he presented.

"Trust is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.

"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of trust that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."

The programme was removed from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.

A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We expressed regret for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."