Exposing Hate: Analysing UK Media Coverage of Islamophobia vs Anti-Semitism
Dedicated to the memory of our friend, the heroic front-line anti-fascist front-liner “Lola” and her partner @MilitantAntifa. Gone too soon. May she rest in power.
By J.Stubbs & J.Spooner
All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others — or so read the outer barnyard wall in George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm. While the squealer-esque perception managers of today’s British media sound the alarm over British anti-Semitism with one side of their mouth, they neglect and at times reject a currently far more insidious, deadly and widespread cancer. Islamophobia and it’s real life effects on it’s victims are just as deadly and pernicious, and the underlying logic of its respective perpetrators are the same. An honest media will make no distinction in its treatment of the two and society should reject both on equal terms. All animals are created equal, after all.
On the 6th of June 2018, independent online media outlet, Evolvepolitics released an article highlighting the disparity in BBC media coverage of anti-Semitism within UK Labour versus that of Islamophobia within the UK Conservatives. This article demonstrated that the BBC website had approximately fifty times the amount of search results dedicated to anti-Semitism in the Labour party than it did of Islamophobia amongst the Tories. Moreover, the author of the piece infers this is due to an anti-Corbyn bias within the BBC.
While this conclusion appears consistent with previous research in this area, it also ignores evidence suggesting these results may have occured due to the gradual normalisation of Islamophobia in the UK more generally. Thus, further important questions arise which the quick-hitting Evolvepolitics article does not touch on: how much coverage do anti-Semitic incidents within the Conservative Party get? How much coverage does Islamophobia in the Labour Party get? Perhaps most importantly, how much national news coverage in general does anti-Semitism garner compared to Islamophobia?
Background
Before such questions can be answered, context must be provided within which the data can be viewed. For instance, there are approximately 270,000 British Jews living in the UK. The national anti-Semitism watchdog in the UK, the CST, states that in 2017 there were approximately 1,382 anti-Semitic incidents recorded by them. The 2017 CST annual report states that:
In 2015, CST signed a national information sharing agreement with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (under its former name of the Association of Chief Police Officers), that allows for the systematic sharing of antisemitic incident reports between CST and the Police, so that both agencies have sight of incidents that had not otherwise been reported to them
Contrastingly, there are approximately 2.75 Million Muslims living in the UK. The UK’s national Islamophobia watchdog is an organisation named Tell Mama. In their most recent annual report (2016), Tell Mama recorded 1,223 direct reports of Islamophobic incidents. Additionally, Tell Mama’s report includes additional police recorded incidents, yet this figure only covers hate crimes from a limited number of UK forces (18/43). Therefore, as well as the 1,223 incidents reported directly to Tell Mama, there were 2,840 Islamophobic hate crimes reported to just under half of all UK police forces. Unfortunately, we can only estimate that based on these limited statistics, the total number of anti-Muslim/Islamophobic hate incidents from all UK police forces will be much higher than the 2,840 recorded by Tell Mama. Furthermore, 2017 statistics from the MET Police, West Midlands Police and Greater Manchester Police have shown that, in terms of what is reported to police, Islamophobic incidents are outnumbering anti-Semitic incidents at a rate of approximately three to one.
Despite a lack of definitive totals, it is clear that Islamophobia, in terms of quantity, is a bigger problem in the UK than anti-Semitism. The logical extension of this is that there is a larger amount of the UK population affected by hate incidents who are Muslim than who are Jewish. This is not particularly controversial or even unexpected, as there is up to ten times the number of UK Muslims than there are UK Jews. It then makes sense to expect more of these incidents. In addition to this, a recent Pew survey has found that a significantly higher percentage of UK citizens would be unwilling to accept Muslims into their family or as their neighbours than they would Jews.
From our research into coverage of four major UK news outlets, it also appears that in 2018, Islamophobic hate incidents have included by far the most violent individual attacks. So far in 2018, the UK major media has covered the trial and sentencing of Finsbury Mosque terrorist Darren Osborne, reported on multiple Mosques being set ablaze, the sentencing of a male for the attempted murder of a Muslim woman and running over of a 12-year-old girl in Leicester, whilst another man was jailed for life for acquiring bombs with the intention of blowing up Mosques all around Scotland. Furthermore, the incomprehensibly atrocious ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ on April 3rd gave rise to an overabundance of Islamophobic hate crimes, ranging from threatening letters being sent to the solicitation of murder, all in the name of hatred of Muslims. Subsequently, questions need to be asked regarding how much media coverage of Ismaophobia one would (or should?) expect.
Exposing Hate: Coverage By Numbers
We collected all the data from the websites of four major media outlets for the entire first six months of 2018 (01/01–30/6). We focused on major, influential national news outlets - the BBC and the Guardian. Additionally, we also included numbers from the Independent and The Times for ‘left’-leaning and ‘right’-leaning representatives. We counted all articles* which either directly discussed anti-Semitism/Islamophobia/anti-Muslim hatred or indirectly** referred to them as part of the broader theme of the article. We did not count search results in total, as some of these were not either directly or indirectly related and often, search results included many duplicate articles.
As demonstrated above, articles discussing anti-Semitism significantly outnumbered those relating to Islamophobia from these major news outlets. In In the case of The Times, this discrepancy was three-fold. The obvious question is then: why was this?
Many will, predictably, assert that anti-Semitic incidents within the Labour Party was the primary cause of the above disparity. We decided to break down these numbers in an attempt to prove whether or not this was the case. Separate totals were then obtained for the articles focusing on anti-Semitism in the context of UK Labour:
As highlighted above, the hypothesis that the far higher coverage of anti-Semitism was due to the incidents within the Labour Party, appears most definitely correct. Approximately seventy-five percent of the overall coverage of anti-Semitism by these outlets was either directly or indirectly linked to the UK Labour Party.
Strikingly, from each major news outlet there was more coverage of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party than there was relating to Islamophobia overall. Again, more questions arise: Can it be argued that anti-Semitism in the Labour party warranted more coverage than all Islamophobic related incidents in the UK put together? Additionally, the questions raised in the Evolvepolitics article regarding the coverage of Islamophobia within the Tory Party still remain.
Conservative Islamophobia
Recently there have been many calls for an independent inquiry into the climate of Islamophobia within the Conservative party. It is important to note, however, this is not a recent thing. The Muslim Council of Britain called for an urgent inquiry into this more than over two years ago following the Conservatives’ anti-Muslim London mayoral campaign. Two years later, over 11 further Muslim umbrella organisations and over 500 mosques have now joined the MCB in demanding action be taken by the Tories. This is in no small part down to the increase in public awareness of recent Tory Party anti-Muslim incidents. In an open letter to the Conservatives, the MCB highlighted some, but by no means all of these incidents:
In addition to the above:
- Former Conservative Co-Chair Baroness Warsi claimed that the current Secretary of State for Environment, Michael Gove held “extreme views” towards Muslims and blamed him for the “Ukipification” of the Party. Similar claims have previously haunted Gove, being an initial signatory for and trustee of anti-Muslim think tank, the Henry Jackson Society.
- Conservative Party candidate for Crofton Park, Karen Sunderland was suspended pending an investigation, after she compared Islam to Nazism.
- A press officer for Conservative MP Jack Lopresti was sacked for Islamophobic posts on social media.
- London Mayor Sadiq Khan claimed he was questioned by Tory activists as to whether he was British and who he would support in the World Cup.
- Police responded to an incident at a night out for young Tory supporters after a fight broke out following a party member claiming “Islam poisons the mind”.
- Calderdale councillor Mike Payne shared an article on social media while referring to “Muslim parasites” who “live off the state and breed like rabbits”. Payne, who defended his post arguing it “stated nothing of a racist nature”.
- Newcastle Council candidate Nick Sundin, tweeted repeatedly Islamophobic remarks in which he called Mohammed “a f***ing paedophile.”
- Bob Blackman, MP for Harrow East, shared a story which had the headline: “Muslim Somali sex gang say raping white British children ‘part of their culture’.” Blackman has also previously retweeted an anti-Muslim post by Tommy Robinson and hosted anti-Muslim, Hindu nationalist Tapan Ghosh in Parliament. He remains a full-fledged member of the party and the executive secretary of the Tory backbenchers’ lobby, the 1922 Committee.
Still, such examples of conservative Islamophobia just keep on coming. The latest of which being the anti-Muslim tweet posted (pictured) by Tory MP Michael Fabricant. This overwhelming amount of incidents has led some Muslim organisations to allege that Islamophobic incidents in the Tory Party at one point were happening on a “weekly basis”. Similarly, others have alleged that the culture of Islamophobia within the Conservative Party is worse than that of anti-Semitism within Labour. Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford has analysed both of these situations in depth and come to the following conclusions:
The Conservatives’ Islamophobia problem is a much bigger issue for two reasons. First, the senior Conservative Sajid Javid has attacked the MCB for harbouring members with unacceptable views on extremism and not representing Muslims. In contrast Labour leaders have not attacked the Jewish organisations in the same way (by saying, for example, that their views come from a pro-Israel stance), and have met directly with them… Second, while Labour has never to my knowledge run an anti-Jewish campaign to win a general or mayoral election, the Conservatives did exactly that against Sadiq Khan who is now mayor of London. David Cameron even libeled an ex-Imam in his attempts to link Khan to Muslim terrorism. Thus on any objective criteria, the Conservative Islamophobia problem has been a more serious story than Labour antisemistism.
Playing Politics?
All these recent incidents indicate a potentially toxic climate of anti-Muslim sentiment bubbling away beneath the surface of the Tory Party. Yet the coverage of Conservative Islamophobia pales in comparison to that of Labour’s anti-Semitism:
Amazingly, all outlets have given a far higher amount of coverage to Labour anti-Semitism compared to that of Tory Islamophobia: the BBC have covered this over ten times more, the Guardian over eight times as much. Predictably, The Times had the biggest disparity, covering it a whopping fifteen times as much, whereas The Independent had the least discrepancy, covering it nearly five times more.
No matter which way you tally it, the numbers so far in 2018 paint an unambiguous picture: the major media outlets in question have afforded far greater coverage to anti-Semitism in general to Islamophobia, despite the larger quantity of annual incidents in UK society. Statistically, the reason for this has been the coverage surrounding anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, yet nowhere near the same level of exposure is given to the plague of Islamophobia encompassing the Tories. The question remains - is this down to what many will argue is the normalisation of Islamophobia generally within UK society? Or, is it as Evolvepolitics suggests, due to an inherent anti-Corbyn agenda within major UK news outlets? We would suspect, and the numbers appear to confirm, that the answer lies somewhere between the two.
In addition to the dozens of Islamophobic revelations coming out of the Tory Party this year, there have been two separate incidents within the Scottish Labour Party which have also been reported on. Results of the coverage of this was as follows:
Incredibly, The Times produced six articles covering one of these incidents — just two articles less than they produced covering the dozens of incidents of Tory Islamophobia. But perhaps the most interesting of all results came from the BBC, who had more than twice as much coverage of Islamophobia within Scottish Labour than they did of Islamophobia in the entire Tory Party.
Failing British Muslims
Figures have shown a much higher number of recorded Islamophobic than anti-Semitic hate incidents every year and, based on media coverage, these appear to include by far the most violent of attacks. Yet regardless of this there was still more reporting/analysis/op-eds/videos in major UK news media (across the political spectrum) which focused on anti-Semitism rather than Islamophobia. Our research shows that this was down, in large part, to the coverage of anti-Semitic incidents within Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. However, when the Conservatives were exposed as having their own crisis with Islamophobia, national media provided nowhere near the same amount of coverage. Ironically, it appears that not only are the major UK media outlets failing to provide adequate coverage of Islamophobia, but they are also helping to facilitate the recent rise of it. From the destructive misreporting on Britain’s ‘Grooming Gangs’ to the sensationalism and scaremongering about the apparent terror threat posed by Muslims, major UK media is leading the way in the creeping normalisation of Islamophobia.
Moreover, the evidence above suggests that there is also some merit to the allegations of an anti-Corbyn bias within the media. Both The Times and the BBC showed a willingness to afford a much higher amount of coverage to Islamophobia when it emanated from two incidents within the Scottish Labour Party, yet offered no such balance when it came to the “truly staggering” number of incidents within the Tories. Amazingly, the BBC gave over twice as much coverage to the two Islamophobic incidents within the Labour Party than the dozens enveloping the Tory Party. The more traditionally ‘liberal’ or ‘left-wing’ outlets of The Independent and The Guardian provided relatively little coverage of Islamophobia, irrelevant of the political party it came from.
Where the relatively large amount of coverage on anti-Semitism in the UK shows a courage and willingness of major media outlets to combat discrimination and stand up for a targeted minority, the lack of this same protection for British Muslims also speaks volumes. With anti-Muslim tabloids such as The Sun and The Daily Mail leading the way in national newspaper circulation numbers, the BBC and more liberal broadsheets such as The Independent and The Guardian must bear a large amount of responsibility for calling attention to Islamophobia and exposing anti-Muslim hatred. Yet still in 2018, it appears the major news outlets are routinely failing British Muslims. Simply put, they must do better.
* ‘articles’ - this refers to any news report/op-ed/news video/comment column
** ‘Indirectly referred’ - articles which were counted as indirectly referring to either anti-Semitism or Islamophobia were required to have at least two sentences explicitly linking the article to either (eg. an article on the UK Labour Party which devoted two sentences linking to anti-Semitism , would have been included).
