🔗 Share this article

The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.

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

The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".

The authority has ordered the BBC to broadcast a evening announcement about its decisions.

"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the regulator stated.

'Risk to Erode Trust'

The watchdog's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's father occupied a position in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.

"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he shared.

"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.

"This error had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."

The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.

A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.

"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."