Nigel Farage hosts GB News Sunday morning political discussion programme The Political Correction [Getty]
An analysis of GB News has found that the British broadcaster was “obsessive” in its “overwhelmingly negative” coverage of Islam and Muslims.
A new report entitled GB News: A Snapshot of Anti-Muslim Hate, released by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) on Tuesday found that the broadcaster’s coverage of Muslims risks inciting violence.
The report found that the channel, which calls itself the “People’s Channel”, mentioned ‘Muslims’ or ‘Islam’ more than 17,000 times over two years of broadcasting, accounting for almost 50 percent of total mentions across UK news channels.
BBC News and Sky News, meanwhile, accounted for 32 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
CfMM’s report found that the “obsessive” coverage of Muslims and Islam “regularly demonises their beliefs and fails to understand the diverse nature of Muslim communities in the UK”.
The GB News identified by the report as “particularly obsessed” with Muslims and Islam included ‘Headliners’ and ‘Patrick Christys Tonight’.
“[This] consistently hostile reporting risks inciting violence and discrimination against Muslim communities and may have contributed to the toxic atmosphere surrounding last summer’s riots,” the report said, adding that the channel rarely features Muslim perspectives, often fails to challenge Islamophobic remarks, and frequently portrays Muslims as a Trojan horse seeking to undermine British values.
During the summer riots, GB News accounted for 62 percent of all clips on UK news channels that associated Muslims with the riots, according to the report. This was the most of any news outlet and three times as many as featured on BBC News or Sky News.
GB News repeatedly framed Muslims as “perpetrators rather than victims of violence”, downplaying attacks on Muslim communities and contributing to a biased narrative, the report said.
It also found that, of 1,180 times the GB News discussed ‘Islamaphobia’ over the last two years, the overwhelming majority were geared towards “rubbishing the concept”, rather than reporting on the “very real and everyday cases of anti-Muslim hatred”.
The report concluded that “GB News hates Islam and Muslims”, urging the media regulator Ofcom to”do its job and regulate the channel”.
A GB News spokesperson rejected the allegations, slamming the report as “inaccurate and defamatory”, without identifying any specific inaccuracies.
‘Fuelling extremism’
Commenting on the findings, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, said she was “shocked”, adding that the consistent stigmatisation of British Muslim communities as the “enemy” by a platform with millions of viewers is deliberate, dangerous and has real-life consequences.
“Seeing the impact of far-right radicalisation with the alarming year-on-year rise in anti-Muslim hatred, culminating in this summer’s riots where mosques and Muslim communities were openly targeted, should have been a wakeup call for all,” Warsi said, calling on regulators and the government to take decisive action against broadcasters fuelling hatred and extremism.
Ofcom Regulator and former ITN executive Stewart Purvis said that the CfMM’s analysis creates a clear challenge to Ofcom.
“Has its deregulated model for broadcast news created an unintended consequence? Can a broadcaster be allowed to try to build its audience and political influence by a consistently negative portrayal of an ethnic community?” Purvis said.
The director of CfMM, Rizwana Hamid, said that, prior to GB News entering the British media landscape, most of her centre’s attention was focused on the misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam in print and online publications, given that Ofcom’s broadcast regulations were always more robust than the press regulator IPSO.
“However, the volume of anti-Muslim hate on GB News and Ofcom’s reluctance to regulate its harmful content has meant that politicians and commentators have been give carte blanche to malign Muslims and Islam in a way that no other channel does,” Hamid said.
“A robust regulator should demand that [GB News] performs according to long-established codes for broadcasters and enforce impartiality regulations.”
