Half of UK news articles about Muslims are biased, landmark study finds
A new study of 40,000 articles from across 30 media outlets in Britain has found that almost half published about Muslims in the UK contained a "high degree of bias", and 70 percent associated Muslims or Islam with negative aspects or behaviours.
The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a nonprofit organisation analysing the media's portrayal of Muslims, says in its report published on Monday that "Muslims are systematically portrayed through lenses of conflict, threat, and controversy" in the media.
The report defines "bias" in terms of the "presence of negative associations with Islam or Muslims, use of broad generalisations rather than specific attribution, instances of misrepresentation, omission of contextual information or diverse perspectives, and quality of headlines".
The report reveals that 70 percent of news articles in 2025 highlight negative aspects of Islam and Muslims, with 44 percent "omitting essential context".
Seventeen percent of articles contain generalisations about Muslims and 13 percent feature "outright misrepresentation", the CfMM says, warning of a "crisis of public understanding".
It finds that nearly 50 percent of all pieces published about Muslims in the UK "contained varying degrees of bias".
The CfMM accuses a "cluster of right-wing publications" of producing most of the biased coverage.
The Spectator had the highest proportion of "very biased" coverage (26 percent), followed by GB News (15.6 percent) and The Telegraph (12.3 percent).
'Systematic pattern of hostile coverage'
The CfMM accuses GB News of having "embedded a systematic pattern of hostile coverage towards Islam and Muslims as a core feature of its editorial identity."
Meanwhile, it says the BBC "consistently records the lowest or near-lowest rates of bias among major outlets across all metrics".
Significantly, the report finds: "Generalisation about Muslims is almost exclusively a right-wing editorial practice."
It says that this proves "harmful coverage of Islam and Muslims cannot be attributed to media-wide tendencies alone", and that "the level of harmful coverage a publication produces is a product of deliberate editorial decisions rather than the inevitable constraints of news reporting".
One GB News piece highlighted in the report was headlined "Let me be impolite: Muslims are racist against Jews".
The CfMM report says the article itself attributes "antisemitism and violence to Muslims as a whole and to Islam as a religion", with "individual acts of violence" framed as products of "the ideology of Islam".
Another article, in The Sun newspaper, was entitled: "'KILLER' FAMILY Gagged and tied teen thrown into swamp & left to drown 'by her BROTHERS' in Muslim sick 'honour killing over Western behaviour'".
The CfMM said it complained to The Sun, arguing the headline linked the honour killing to Islam without evidence - after which The Sun amended its headline to remove the reference to Muslims.
Rizwana Hamid, director of CfMM, said: "As the largest study of its kind ever conducted in the UK, this report presents deeply concerning evidence of structural bias in how Muslims are portrayed in the UK press."
Hamid added that it "points to a systemic problem within our media ecosystem. When entire communities are repeatedly framed through lenses of suspicion or threat, it inevitably shapes public attitudes, political debate and the everyday lives of British Muslims".
Research by the think tank Equi found a 43 percent rise in anti-Muslim incidents between 2023 and 2024, but revealed that public attitudes towards British Muslims are far more positive than political and media discourse often suggests.
'This report presents deeply concerning evidence of structural bias in how Muslims are portrayed in the UK press'
- Rizwana Hamid, director of CfMM
Equi also found that a majority of the public holds either favourable or neutral views of Muslims, and this increases when people are shown real examples of Muslim contributions to British society, from charity work to community engagement.
The CfMM report was released on the day that the government unveiled a new non-statutory definition of anti-Muslim hostility after months of consultation and controversy surrounding the process.
Communities Secretary Steve Reed said in the House of Commons: "Religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims are also at record levels, with almost half of these crimes targeted towards the Muslim community and many living in fear that they will be targeted because of how they look or assumptions over where they come from."
The definition describes anti-Muslim hostility as criminal acts directed at Muslims "because of their religion" or at "those who are perceived to be Muslim", as well as "prejudicial stereotyping" and "engaging in unlawful discrimination" intended to "disadvantage Muslims in public and economic life".
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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