🔗 Share this article British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Regulations, States Ofcom The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom. An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive". The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy". The authority has directed the BBC to air a prime-time statement about its findings. "As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated. 'Risk to Damage Confidence' The authority's statement stated: "Our probe determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading. "Consequently that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided. "Trust is at the center of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC. "This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict." The film was removed from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness. A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations. "We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."