British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, States Ofcom

The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.

An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the film was "materially misleading".

The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".

The regulator has directed the corporation to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.

"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.

'Risk to Damage Confidence'

The watchdog's report said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.

"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he presented.

"Credibility is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.

"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable amounts of trust that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it violated the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.

A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.

"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."