By Christiana Warne
How the media portrays victims and perpetrators, especially when it comes to religion and crime, is often deemed misleading.
A 2025 report by the UK’s Islamophobia Response Unit (IRU) said the media framing often casts white victims as the primary target for hate crimes. That’s despite Muslims experiencing rising levels of abuse and hate crimes.
The same report highlighted media silence when it comes to extremism, with an example of the under-reporting of a foiled far-right terror plot against a Muslim centre. “Despite the gravity of the plot, mainstream UK media coverage was minimal, with Sky News among the few outlets reporting substantively.”
The IRU said had the perpetrator been Muslim and about to attack a church or synagogue, the coverage would have immediate and politically charged.
The media in 2026 – the case of The Spectator
The latest examination of the media and its coverage of issues related to Islam and Muslims focuses on The Spectator.
The report, No Mere Spectator: Anti-Muslim Hostility in Britain’s Oldest Political Magazine, by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) examined 3,733 articles between January 2018 and December 2025 and found “consistent patterns of anti-Muslim bias across the magazine’s coverage”.
The report claims the influential political magazine consistently constructs Muslims as a problem, “while invoking the language of free speech to place that coverage beyond criticism”.
The patterns identified include:
- Muslims are framed through culture wars, and are viewed as a civilisational and cultural threat
- Islam is an inherent threat
- Being Muslim is presented as a predictor of risk
- They are framed as a security issue, not a policy issue
- Muslim rights are presented as a threat to liberalism
The report acknowledges that not all coverage is problematic. It states it does not equate strong opinion or criticism of Islam or of “Islamist” extremism with bias. It says on limited occasions, The Spectator has published serious and valuable work on both.
It says the value of its latest report lies in the cumulative patterns identified across thousands of articles over the eight-year period.
The report found the overwhelming majority of articles reviewed exhibited some form of bias in their coverage of Muslims and/or Islam. Combined, 57.4 per cent of all articles were rated either “Biased” or “Very Biased”. Only 11.6 per cent of articles were found to be “Not Biased”.
Islamophobia, the subject of 1,194 articles, recorded the highest level of bias of any major topic area, with 72.8 per cent of articles rated either “Biased” or “Very Biased”.
Why do Muslims have to justify their existence?
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a member of the House of Lords, a former minister for Faith and Communities, and former Chairman of the Conservative Party, spoke at the launch of the report, saying the media and politics in the country have followed “a slow drum beat of where the right has become the far right, and the fascist far right has become the mainstream”.
With the far right now becoming the norm, these tropes surrounding Muslims continue to dehumanise communities. She said it has stopped the natural progression of a religious minority. It has stopped them from integrating and becoming mainstream.
She said the current situation was not just about Islamophobia, it reflects the resurgence of nationalism, the diminishing of democracy and the rise of the oligarchy.
“Are we (Muslims) going to spend the next decade, [like] the last two decades, justifying why we are good people or are we going to say we’re done?”
Truth, trust and the future
Peter Oborne, writer and former political editor of The Spectator, emphasised how the outlet is obsessively anti Muslim. “It religiously feeds its readers this systemic bigotry, [which] has very little regard for accuracy or truth. It just makes statements,” he said at the launch, adding: “It’s terrifying for Muslims,” whose sense of identity and belonging is attacked.
David Yellend, former editor of The Sun, believes the CfMM’s report contains nothing that would surprise The Spectator. He said that The Spectator does think Islam is an evil religion and harmful views like these will influence the next generation of journalists, a very depressing and worrying notion.
“It is entirely possible that [The Spectator] won’t disagree with quite a lot of what’s in this report, because a lot of these columnists believe what they’re writing.”
The Spectator is not the only UK media outlet being singled out for its coverage. An earlier CfMM study found ‘widespread and systemic anti-Muslim bias’ across the British media landscape. It found almost half of all articles referencing Muslims or Islam in 2025 contained some degree of bias, and around 70 per cent of coverage associated Muslims with negative behaviours or themes.
At a time of growing fears for safety among Muslims and other religious groups, the media’s role in framing stories related to religion and religious groups has an important impact on security, attitudes and social cohesion.
