The New World’s expose of GB News’s repeated Ofcom code breaches named several problems with forensic precision: Reform have been given their own TV channel, the regulator is asleep at the wheel and while they doze, Britain’s broadcast landscape is being aggressively reshaped by the far right.
I want to bring another GB News problem to the forefront. It is one touched on by Alan Rusbridger when he notes that presenter Matt Goodwin “can carry on, unchallenged, with his obsession about what Muslims are up to in Britain.” If only it were just Matt Goodwin.
The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), an independent non-profit organisation that studies media coverage of Islam and Muslims, spent two years documenting what that channel’s obsession looks like in practice, and another year watching how it has become carte blanche for falsehoods, tropes, generalisations and outright bigotry.
Its conclusion about GB News’s coverage of the religion and the community is stark: this doesn’t feel like sporadic bias, but a sustained editorial project.
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Our two-year study, carried out between October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2024, found that GB News accounted for nearly half of all mentions of Muslims and Islam across UK broadcast news, outnumbering BBC News and Sky News combined. When our report was published in late 2024, it said: “GB News has an excessive, almost obsessive, focus on Muslims and regularly demonises their beliefs and practices. Programmes rarely have Muslim contributors and its stories about Islam and Muslims are overwhelmingly negative, more so than any other channel.”
Now we can reveal exclusively for the New World that this disparity has widened further. In the period from January 2025 to today, GB News accounts for 56 per cent of total mentions of Muslims on UK broadcast news. That is a nine-percentage-point increase on our earlier findings.
GB News is not merely maintaining its disproportionate focus on Muslim communities. It is intensifying it.
The imbalance is not just quantitative but qualitative. Coverage is structured around recurring ideas of cultural threat, demographic anxiety, and the rubbishing of Islamophobia.
In February, as Britain’s Muslims prepared for Ramadan and Eid, GB News aired a segment in which host Patrick Christys claimed that some Pakistani men celebrate Eid by “inviting families round to rape white women.” Thus, a holy day marked by families gathering and communities expressing collective joy was smeared with a sexual violence trope.
The logic feels identical to the medieval blood libel of Jewish people: a minority’s religious practice recast as a ritualised threat to the majority. A sacred occasion is transformed into evidence of predatory intent, the faith itself becoming the vector of threat.
GB News also deals in omission. During the 2024 riots, mosques were attacked by mobs. Yet GB News produced hours of coverage associating Muslims with disorder in Birmingham and elsewhere.
In Middlesbrough, where Muslim and immigrant families were targeted and feared for their safety, repeated references to unrest omitted any mention of Muslims as victims. One told us they had to switch to Al Jazeera English to find a dedicated report on the destruction of homes and vehicles in Teesside. Britain’s news channel was ignoring those it seems to consider un-British.
Beyond framing, there is a noticeable pipeline which feeds the hate. Claims originating from fringe or far right sources circulate online, get elevated by GB News into broadcast content, and by the time they reach wider audiences, carry the authority of repetition.
In mid-March, a fabricated story claiming a Canadian school had banned food during Ramadan illustrated this precisely. The original source was a Canadian far-right agitator, whose claims moved through X before GB News ran them as news on its website.
The story was false. The source was decidedly not impartial. Neither fact mattered. What mattered was that it fit the template GB News has perfected: Muslim practice framed as an attack on non-Muslims. Fabrication is a feature, not a failure.
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Another case from last year shows a related tactic: trying to manufacture a story. In a show hosted by Ben Leo – seen as a rising star of the channel and since promoted – local concerns about traffic congestion around a new Muslim funeral building in Farnham were reframed as fears around Muslim practices of body storage – or, as Leo said, “the way they’re buried and stored”. The Centre for Media Monitoring contacted local journalists and Farnham council directly; none had raised the issue in those terms.
Leo’s first on-camera interviewee dismissed the body storage framing entirely. The presenter ignored him, brought on a second guest, and asked whether it is “legal in the UK to store an unrefrigerated body for 24 hours.” This was not journalism. It was attempted construction.
The South Lakes Islamic Centre case shows what happens when that construction has real-world consequences. A modest three-storey mosque in Dalton-in-Furness was repeatedly labelled a “mega mosque” and “monstrosity mosque” in the heart of the Lake District. The site actually sits eight miles outside the national park. GB News also falsely linked a separate children’s home planning application to the mosque development.
Westmorland and Furness Council was forced to publish a factsheet specifically correcting the broadcaster’s falsehoods. Local suppliers withdrew from the construction project following GB News segments, and far right groups adopted the channel’s framing wholesale, converging on the site for repeated demonstrations.
Regulatory response has been almost non-existent. In February 2025, presenter and Telegraph columnist Camilla Tominey hosted the UAE-based “disinfluencer” Amjad Taha and allowed him, without challenge, to claim the UK has “more extremists than the Middle East” and that Muslim communities are controlled by a foreign political group. Taha’s credibility had been questioned by media organisations as far back as 2020.
CfMM formally complained to Ofcom about the various inaccuracies. Ofcom ignored it. The High Court, however, did not: late last year it forced GB News to pay substantial libel damages for broadcasting a false allegation that Islamic Relief UK had funded terrorist groups. Here was a court-compelled retraction of a libel against one of Britain’s largest Muslim charities, and the regulator had already decided it was not worth examining.
The Patrick Christys Show, which begins in the Fox News style with a long-winded monologue that feels more sermon than journalism, encapsulates the channel’s approach. In a single week last March, Christys’ monologues repeated an unsubstantiated allegation against the newly appointed Ofsted head Mufti Hamid Patel; railed against a modest fundraising effort by 100 Muslim families to build a mosque with 17 parking spaces, calling it a “mega mosque”; condemned halal slaughter while ignoring documented cases of mistreatment at non-halal abattoirs; questioned when there would be a documentary on Muslim women’s rights in response to Netflix’s Adolescence and even questioned King Charles’s competence because the call to prayer was heard at Windsor Castle during a Ramadan event.
Imagine another group of people, or believers in a religion, being targeted by a TV channel as Muslims are on GB News. There would be national outrage, the Mail and Telegraph would make it front-page news and every lever of the regulatory body would no doubt be exercised to hold those flouting rules to account.
Ofcom has had plenty of material to study on all of this. Just as in the cases highlighted by Alan Rusbridger and the New World, it has repeatedly failed to act. In abandoning its remit, it has allowed the shifting of the Overton window.
We are no longer in a place where Muslims were occasionally disparaged and smeared in the press. Now, this feels like an all-out assault via broadcasting license.
Faisal Hanif is a researcher and author at The Centre for Media Monitoring
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