British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Media Regulations, States UK Media Regulator

The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".

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

Ofcom has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.

"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.

'Potential to Erode Confidence'

The regulator's report said: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.

"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the information he provided.

"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the potential to damage the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."

The film was pulled from the online platform in February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.

A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.

"We issued an apology for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are finalised."