🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Breach of Media Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom. An investigation by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive". The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy". The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time declaration about its conclusions. "Given this constitutes a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said. 'Possibility to Erode Trust' The watchdog's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate. "This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he provided. "Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster. "This failing had the risk to undermine the very considerable degrees of credibility that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict." The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness. A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."