GB News Hates Muslims – And Now We Have Receipts

In April, video footage captured a man verbally abusing some Muslim women in the street in Romford, Essex.

Following the women down a high street, the man calls them “Muslim c****” before telling them to “f*** off out of England”.

“F*** off back to Muslim [inaudible]. We are a Christian country,” he says.

“We don’t like you,” the man continued. “We are a Christian country and we don’t f******* like you.”

Local campaign group Redbridge Community Action Group asked for help in identifying the “sick racist” and the video went viral. The leader of Havering council called the attack “a despicable display of cowardice”. The man, Terry Eury, 56, later pleaded guilty to two religiously aggravated public order offences and was given a suspended sentence of 12 weeks imprisonment.

Over on GB News, however, the incident occasioned a discussion of whether Islamophobia is really a thing.

#Muslim women abused by a racist in #ROMFORD, told they’re “a cancer on the country” and repeatedly told to go back where they come from in not so polite words#GBNews reviewers:

“not Islamophobic”

“not racist”

“context is needed”

“I don’t know if it’s a racist attack” pic.twitter.com/LlDUBakCsq

— Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) (@cfmmuk) April 22, 2024

While hateful, the incident “isn’t, arguably, racist,” said panellist Josh Howie, who added that there was a “hypocrisy” in the fact that the victims of the man’s tirade had attended a pro-Palestine march. “It’s a bit more blurred than we might think – but his behaviour is unacceptable,” he said.

Howie’s remarks will not surprise anyone who has switched over to GB News out of morbid fascination. But the sheer scale of its obsession with Islam and Muslims, detailed in a report released this week, is shocking.

According to the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), set up by the Muslim Council of Britain, GB News mentioned Muslims or Islam more than 17,000 times between October 2022 and September 2024. The channel accounted for almost half of the total mentions of Muslims or Islam on the UK’s three dedicated TV news channels – including BBC News, Sky News and GB News – during that period.

The channel serves up a constant diet of anti-Muslim sentiment, suggesting that Muslims receive special treatment, run the Labour party, and are planning to take over society from their mosques – echoing far-right conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement”.

Meanwhile, racism against Muslims is downplayed. For while Islamophobia was mentioned 1,180 times on GB News – 60% of all mentions on UK news channels – this was mostly to rubbish it as a concept.

The CfMM report concludes, simply: “GB News hates Islam and Muslims.”

Commenting on the report, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who quit the Conservative benches in September over the party’s Islamophobia, said that GB News’ hateful content is “deliberate, dangerous and has real-life consequences.”

During this summer’s riots, the channel continued to spin its “two-tier society” narrative and framed Muslims as the perpetrators of violence, not its victims. According to the report, none of the channel’s reporting of the rioting in Middlesbrough mentioned violence against Muslims. By contrast, an incident in Birmingham in which Muslims attacked a pub and assaulted a customer received extensive coverage. GB News’s political editor Chris Hope said: “The government’s got to recognise there is violence on both sides.”

As for the rioters, GB News presenter Michelle Dewberry called them “white working class” Britons who had “the audacity to take to the streets about something they’re passionate about”, while admitting that attacking police stations and places of worship was “wrong”.

In some cases, presenters stretched the truth to portray rioters in the most flattering possible light. In one hair-raising example, presenter Darren Grimes said that a teenager had been jailed for “flying an England flag near a mosque”. In fact, the individual in question pled guilty to having firelighters and planning to set the mosque ablaze.

As well as airing far-right talking points, GB News presenters have defended far-right figureheads. When former Labour MP Luciana Berger described Tommy Robinson as far-right on her show, an irked Dewberry said: “You will say he’s on the far right, I can tell you how many people will disagree, many people will say that what he is, is somebody who has the balls to speak out and raise concerns about what many people are experiencing.”

It isn’t just GB News that comes in for sharp criticism in CfMM’s report – media regulator Ofcom does, too. In it, CfMM director Rizwana Hamid says Ofcom’s reluctance to regulate GB News has given its commentators “carte blanche to malign Muslims and Islam”. (An Ofcom spokesperson said: “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.”).

When it was launched, GB News – backed by the evangelical Christian hedge fund manager Paul Marshall and Emirati investment firm Legatum – was mocked for its shonky production values and dismal ratings. The laughter gave way to concern at the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the channel – such as author Naomi Wolf saying that the role out of Covid vaccines was “mass murder” equivalent to what “doctors in pre-Nazi Germany” did. Under pressure from an advertising boycott, GB News chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos has often claimed to be cleaning up its act, as if there had been mere growing pains, all while insisting that the channel is proud to be a “disruptor”.

While the more bizarro extremes of its content may have diminished, GB News is still a prolific and noisy purveyor of Islamophobia. Selling the idea that British Muslims are an insidious force is already normalised in the print media, which has more lax regulations. GB News’s innovation has been to bring that idea to our screens, turning the volume up to 11.

This report rubbishes the dubious notion that GB News has meaningfully sorted itself out following Ofcom’s previous rulings. Indeed, GB News’s response to the report indicates that it has no plans to change. Its spokesperson told Novara Media: “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,” they added.

On Tuesday night, Patrick Christys, a presenter who is identified as the source of much of GB News’s content about Islam, was not in an apologetic mood. On his show, he called the report a “smear”, told viewers he will “not be scared into silence” and claimed that the channel covers Islam so much because it doesn’t do much foreign news.

His talk of two-tier policing and Muslims getting preferential treatment are, Christys added, “an honestly held belief, I’m afraid.”

“I have no desire to be unfair to Muslims, they contribute a huge amount of good to this country … but at the same time I will not succumb to the fear of being labelled something I am not: An Islamophobe,” he said.

As his assembled panel of guests rubbished the report, Christys added: “More people are watching this show right now than Sky News, probably.”