British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator

The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.

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

The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".

The regulator has directed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time statement about its findings.

"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.

'Potential to Damage Credibility'

The regulator's report said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.

"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he presented.

"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that the public would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."

The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in July an internal BBC review found it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.

A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."