THE Spectator has produced “sustained and systematic” biased coverage against Muslims over an eight-year period, a major new report has found.
The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) has published detailed research of the right-wing magazine’s coverage of Muslims and Islam between January 2018 and December 2025, examining almost 4000 articles.
It has revealed that 57.4% of articles – more than 2100 pieces – were rated “biased” or “very biased” against Muslims, with only a small number “meeting standards of balanced and fair representation”.
It is the most extensive independent analysis ever conducted of a single British publication’s reporting on Muslim communities.
The centre says the report distinguishes legitimate scrutiny of Islam and Muslims from coverage that misrepresents, distorts or generalises, and counts only the latter as bias.
Each article is assessed against five predefined editorial indicators, and an article is classified as biased only if it breaches at least two of these criteria, with the strongest classifications requiring four or five breaches.
Ex-Tory minister Michael Gove became the magazine's editor in October 2024.
The report identifies a sustained pattern of bias concluding that while not every Spectator article is problematic, its coverage over the study period has been disproportionately negative.
Rizwana Hamid, director at the Centre for Media Monitoring, said: “The cumulative effect of this coverage is the construction of Muslims as an exceptional population whose presence is associated with threat, conflict and instability.
“This is not the product of individual editorial failures – it is a structural pattern embedded over eight years and beyond.”
The study found almost 73% of Islamophobia coverage was “biased” or “very biased” while almost 65% of articles about antisemitism were “biased” or “very biased” against Muslims.
Researchers found five “recurring mechanisms” of bias which included delegitimisation of Islamophobia, where concern about anti-Muslim prejudice is routinely framed as censorship or bad faith.
Other mechanisms included collective attribution – where actions or beliefs of a minority within Muslim communities are attributed to Muslims as a whole – and theological misrepresentation, where Islamic concepts and texts are presented through their most hostile interpretations without engagement with mainstream scholarship.
There was also evidence of asymmetric attribution – where religious identity is foregrounded when Muslims are perpetrators and omitted when they are victims – and contested or unsubstantiated claims about Islam being published without challenge.
Peter Oborne, former political editor of The Spectator, said: “Today, as it approaches the 200th anniversary of its foundation by Robert Rintoul, The Spectator has become one of the most influential British media apologists for bigotry, hatred and racism: an upmarket version of GB News.”
The results follow on from CfMM’s landmark 2025 State of the Media report, which identified The Spectator as the UK’s most proportionally biased major outlet, with more than one in four articles classified as “Very Biased.”
The Spectator has been approached for comment.
