UK media bias against Muslims, says group that analysed 40,000 articles 

London, United Kingdom – As anti-Muslim hate crimes rise in Britain, so too does biased coverage of Muslims in the media, a new study suggests.

The Centre for Media Monitoring, a nonprofit organisation that examines how Muslims and Islam are portrayed in the media, said in a report released on Monday that of about 40,000 articles it assessed from 30 outlets, 70 percent associated Muslims or Islam with negative aspects or behaviours.

“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,” said Rizwana Hamid, the group’s director.

The report said almost half of the articles published about Muslims in the UK, or about 20,000, contained a “high degree of bias”.

The data point to a “systemic problem within our media ecosystem”, Hamid said. “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”.

News organisations that address the concerns and interests of right-wing voters in Britain were more likely to produce biased coverage about Muslims, the report found.

The organisation named The Spectator magazine and GB News television channel as the “worst across all five bias categories” – negative coverage, generalisations, misrepresentations, contextual omissions and problematic headlines – as well as newspapers such as The Telegraph, Jewish Chronicle, Daily Express, The Sun, Daily Mail and The Times.

“Harmful coverage is not incidental among these outlets,” the report read.

At the other end of the scale, the outlets least likely to produce biased coverage maligning Muslims and their faith were: ITV, the Metro newspaper, BBC, the PA news agency, The Guardian, The Associated Press, London Evening Standard and Sky News.

The study was released as Muslims across Britain face increasing hostility, in part due to the rising popularity of hard-right public figures and swelling anti-immigration sentiment.

“Extensive research has shown correlations between negative portrayals of Muslims and rising hate crime, employment discrimination, and support for restrictive policies,” the report said.

In October, the UK reported that religious hate crimes against Muslims rose 19 percent during the year ending in March 2025 compared with the previous period. The Home Office said anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked after the 2024 Southport mass stabbing at a girls dance class, which agitators on social media had blamed on a fictitious Muslim migrant.

Recently, mosques have been targeted, and British Muslims as well as other ethnic minority groups have reported a growing sense of unease and insecurity as a sense of nationalism grows in line with the growth of the far-right Reform UK party.

Observers said the kind of racism returning to the UK has echoes of the discrimination witnessed in the 1970s and 1980s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer told ITV late last year that it was “tearing our country apart”.

The Centre for Media Monitoring said in one example it studied, right-wing media amplified a claim by United States President Donald Trump that London was governed by “Sharia law”.

Trump in September told the United Nations General Assembly: “I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed. It’s been so changed. … Now they want to go to Sharia law. But you are in a different country. You can’t do that.”

While The Metro fact-checked the claim and The Independent provided contextualised commentary, “opinion-let outlets such as the Daily Express went further by treating the conspiracy as credible”, the report said.

“Presenting baseless claims as matters of debate normalises misinformation and fuels anti-Muslim narratives, underscoring the media’s responsibility to challenge falsehoods decisively rather than inadvertently legitimising them,” the group said.