By Maral Tarpinian

A major new study has found widespread anti-Muslim bias across the British media. Nearly half of all articles referencing Islam or Muslims contain measurable bias and the vast majority of them have negative connotations.

The Center for Media Monitoring’s (CfMM) report, which analysed 40,913 articles across 30 major UK news outlets in 2025, is the largest study to examine how Muslims are portrayed in the British media.

According to the study, 70% of coverage associated Muslims or Islam with negative aspects or behaviors. While not all negative stories are biased in their nature, the report suggests a pattern of this scale can only point toward a skewed media narrative.

Almost 20,000 articles, just under half of those analysed, contained measurable bias. Measurable bias is defined as the presence of at least two problematic factors such as generalisation, misrepresentation, omission of context or misleading headlines.

This persistent negative framing sadly has very real social consequences, where previous studies have linked these Muslim portrayals to rising hate crimes, employment discrimination and increased support for restrictive policies that target Muslim communities

The most prevalent problem the study identified in biased articles, which appeared across the political spectrum, was missing context.

The study found that consistently the most biased reporting came from several right-leaning publications, which scored the worst across all five bias indicators used in the study. The Spectator particularly stood out with more than one in four of their articles classified as “very biased”.

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail published the most severely biased articles. Combined with GB News, the three outlets make up almost half of all “very biased” coverage identified in the study, despite collectively producing about a fifth of the analysed content.

On the other hand, BBC and The Guardian had significantly lower rates of generalisation of 6% for BBC and 11% for The Guardian. The report notes BBC as an example that it is possible for high-volume newsrooms to implement and respect editorial safeguards against harmful framing.

Rizwana Hamid, CfMM director, said the repeated portrayal of Muslims through suspicious and threatening lenses shapes public attitudes.

“When nearly half of all articles referencing Muslims or Islam are biased,” she said, “it points to a systemic problem within our media ecosystem.”