GB News broadcasts half of all UK stories about Muslims, study finds

Researchers warned that the overwhelmingly negative coverage of Islam and Muslims on GB News ‘potentially fuelled community tensions and contributed to civil unrest’.

Islamophobia Awareness Month

GB News has been slammed for its ‘almost obsessive coverage of Muslims’, with a study finding that the right-wing channel accounted for half of all news broadcast coverage of Muslims over a two-year period, much of it negative.

The study, carried out by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a project which collects evidence of how Islam and Muslims are reported in the national broadcast and print media, found that over a two-year period, GB News mentioned Muslims or Islam more than 17,000 times in its output, which they say accounted for almost 50% of total mentions on UK news channels. BBC News and Sky News accounted for 32% and 21% respectively.

Researchers warned that the overwhelmingly negative coverage of Islam and Muslims on GB News ‘potentially fuelled community tensions and contributed to civil unrest’.

The study also found that Islamophobia had been referenced on GB News on 1,180 occasions accounting for 60% of all mentions when compared with BBC News and Sky News. It added: “Yet, rather than reporting on the very real and everyday cases of anti-Muslim hatred, GB News stories overwhelmingly are geared towards rubbishing the concept of Islamophobia.”

When it came to the far-right riots in the summer, researchers found that GB News accounted for 62% of all clips on UK news channels that associated Muslims with the riots.

CfMM stated: “This was the most of any news channel 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 mosques and Muslim communities, contributing to a biased narrative.”

Rizwana Hamid, the director of CfMM, told the Guardian: “Prior to GB News entering the British media landscape most of our 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.

“A robust regulator should demand that the channel performs according to long-established codes for broadcasters and enforce impartiality regulations.”

A GB News spokesperson said: “This inaccurate and defamatory report is nothing more than a cynical, self-serving attempt to silence free speech. It proves exactly why a news organisation like GB News needs to exist and why it is succeeding. We are concerned that at no point did this project of the Muslim Council of Britain contact GB News or its presenters to allow them to respond to these highly defamatory allegations.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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