GB News has hit out at a report accusing it of “almost obsessive” coverage of Muslims, saying it is “inaccurate and defamatory” and that it was not approached for comment beforehand.
The new report, released by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring, assessed two years of output from GB News, BBC News and Sky News, finding that the opinion-led station accounted for almost half of all mentions of Muslims among the three.
CfMM said the channel used certain words associated with Muslims — for example Islamism, jihad, mosque, Sharia, prophet, Caliphate and burka — 17,000 times across the period assessed.
It also claimed that GB News mentioned Islamophobia 1,180 times — mostly in a critical way — and that during the summer’s far-right unrest, it “accounted for 62% of all clips on UK news channels that associated Muslims with the riots”.
The report concluded that while its findings did not mean “that every contributor or presenter hates Islam and Muslims or that GB News does not sometimes publish good commentary… structurally and systematically, we believe there is an endemic problem with GB News’ coverage of Islam and Muslims”.
Muslim commentators are rarely brought on, CfMM said, and “its stories about Islam and Muslims are overwhelmingly negative… its presenters often fail to challenge Islamophobic remarks from guests, contributing to an unbalanced and biased narrative”.
A GB News spokesperson said in response: “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.”
The channel did not identify specific inaccuracies. An un-bylined article on the GB News website also noted: “The UK Government has a longstanding position of not engaging with the Muslim Council of Britain due to previous leaders of the organisation having ‘taken positions that contradict our fundamental values’ as a country.”
Ofcom responds to Centre for Media Monitoring claim it is not enforcing impartiality
CfMM called on broadcast regulator Ofcom to “either stop the pretence that it is actually regulating the channel and enforcing impartiality, or do its job and regulate the channel”.
Stewart Purvis, a former editor and chief executive of ITN and a one-time Ofcom content and standards partner, commented in the report’s foreword that the findings had “come about because of a series of deregulatory actions taken by Ofcom…
“The CfMM report 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 a minoritised ethnic community?”
An Ofcom spokesperson said in response: “All regulated broadcasters must comply with our broadcasting rules. We enforce these rules fairly and proportionately, acting independently and impartially at all times.
“We have found GB News in breach of our rules 12 times, and recently imposed a £100,000 financial penalty on GB News for breaking due impartiality rules.”
GB News is currently pursuing a legal case against Ofcom, asking the High Court to block a sanction relating to the Q&A programme with then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that resulted in that fine.
In November GB News for the first time received more viewership than Sky News for a full month, according to BARB data.
The Centre for Media Monitoring has long campaigned on the representation of Muslims in the news, often lodging complaints with press regulator IPSO or carrying out sentiment analysis of newspaper coverage. A 2021 report found that nearly 60% of online news articles about Muslims were negative.
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