Earlier this month, Policy Exchange published a new report, which I co-authored, on the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) — an activist group at the forefront of efforts to impose an Islamophobia definition that would criminalise conduct, in the words of its supporters, “far beyond” hatred or discrimination, and enforce what they call “appropriate limits to free speech” when talking about Islam and Muslims. Our report shows how CfMM, whilst seeking to combat the unfair representation of Muslims in the country’s media, has a greater ambition: in its own words, “taking control of the narrative” about Islam, which, in practice, means restricting media discourse on Islamism, including its extremist and terrorist forms.
CfMM’s Islamist inheritance from the Rushdie Affair
This is perhaps unsurprising, since CfMM itself has close links to Islamism. CfMM was established in 2019 as a project of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which, as a government report observes, was created by members of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi wings of the Islamist group Jamaat-i-Islami.
The founder of Jamaat-i-Islami, Abul Ala Mawdudi, saw Islam’s global supremacy as a revolutionary obligation. “Islam requires the earth—not just a portion, but the whole planet,” he wrote, calling for a “universal revolution” to be achieved by “press[ing] into service all the forces which can bring about a revolution”. The term for this, he declared, is “jihad” — not just armed struggle, but also “the potency of speech and writing”, an ideological jihad to transform minds and impose Islamic supremacy through media and discourse. CfMM, in striving to “take control of the narrative” about Islam, appears to be the modern incarnation of this idea.
The MCB was established in 1997 according to a blueprint drawn up three years earlier by the National Interim Committee on Muslim Unity (NICMU). The leaders of NICMU were also involved in the United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA), which was set up in response to the Rushdie Affair of 1989. UKACIA unsuccessfully lobbied the Government to ban The Satanic Verses and tried to persuade the Government to extend the then-existing blasphemy laws to include Islam. Blasphemy laws in England and Wales were abolished in 2008.
However, the campaign to restrict speech about Islam did not begin or end with the Rushdie Affair. Between 2001 and 2005, the MCB repeatedly lobbied the Government to introduce laws criminalising incitement to religious hatred, supporting proposals that would have made it an offence not only to threaten Muslims but also to “insult” or “abuse” religious beliefs — measures critics warned would amount to de facto blasphemy laws. The Government attempted to include such clauses in three separate acts — the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2005).
During the passage of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, the House of Lords amended the legislation to remove “insulting” and “abusive” language, restrict the offence to “threatening” words or behaviour, and require intent to stir up hatred. A comprehensive free speech clause was also added. Whatever its stated aims, the effect of the MCB’s lobbying was to promote legal changes that would have deterred open discussion or critique of Islam in public life.
The MCB — shunned from governmental engagement since its refusal to force the resignation of a senior official after he signed the pro-Hamas Istanbul declaration in 2009 — has long sought to determine what counts as normative Islam in the national public space. For example, the MCB’s 2007 guidance for schools to accommodate the allegedly unique needs of Muslim children — authored by the man now banned from involvement with schools, at the centre of the Trojan Horse scandal — presented a restrictive view on Muslim dress codes. The MCB also rejected a Muslim marriage contract drawn up by the Muslim Institute in 2008 that sought to give Muslim women new rights befitting 21st-century Britain; the MCB claimed that sharia could not be altered.
CfMM at the vanguard of Islamophobia activism
Islamist pressure to control public speech, policy, and law regarding Islam has a decades-long history
This background is noteworthy, since it is important to recognise that the Islamist pressure to control public speech, policy, and law regarding Islam has a decades-long history. The MCB has played a key role in this, but others have too, such as the Association of Muslim Lawyers, which, in 2002, urged the House of Lords Select Committee on Religious Offences for anti-blasphemy legislation — which had not yet been repealed — to criminalise behaviour that is “likely to shock and outrage” the Muslim umma. “[I]t is not just the people who follow the religion,” stated its chairman, “but it is the religion itself which has to be protected.”
This same impulse is visible today in CfMM’s campaign to rewrite media regulation. Its staff have lobbied IPSO, the independent press regulator, to extend the discrimination clause beyond individuals to cover “groups or at the very least to institutions, such as schools or clubs or organisations or mosques”.
From the Rushdie Affair through the Batley Grammar School protests, the Lady of Heaven protests, to the Wakefield Quran incident, Britain has witnessed the growth of an environment in which there is greater demand for the criminalisation of anything deemed offensive to Islamic sensitivities. Alarmingly, there also seems to be a growing receptiveness among the courts and political elites — demonstrated by the recent conviction of Hamit Coskun for burning a Quran, and the Labour government’s moves to introduce the APPG definition of Islamophobia.
CfMM is the most recent manifestation of this long-running effort to police language and thought about Islam in Britain’s public space. It represents the most sophisticated and strategic vanguard of this movement to date — not merely lobbying or protesting, but actively embedding its agenda into the institutions that shape public discourse. It does this through its training of news organisations, universities, and press regulators.
A flawed methodology based on “subjective decisions”
CfMM claims that “large sections of the British media” are “Islamophobic” and has produced numerous reports that compile alleged examples of “Islamophobic”, anti-Muslim bias. Some of these reports are focused on specific topics, such as terrorism; three of them are focused on Palestine or the Israel-Gaza war.
CfMM provides statistics for its claims, drawing upon a methodology it says has been “approved” by academics, providing its work with a veneer of credibility. It claims that almost 60 per cent of articles about Muslims and Islam dwell on negative aspects, and that almost 10 per cent of articles misrepresent them.
However, CfMM’s methodology is deeply flawed. It is both partisan and opaque. How it assesses a given article to be “biased” or “misleading” is based upon a highly contestable, ideological point of view regarding what counts as normatively Islamic. For example, CfMM deemed as “misleading” an article written by Qanta Ahmed, a female Muslim doctor, which expressed disagreement with the view that the full-face veil, the niqab, is compulsory in Islam. CfMM simply ignores a diversity of Muslim views on such matters. A television interview in which a guest raised concerns about sharia councils operating a parallel legal system — a view supported by multiple studies — was also wrongly classified as “misleading”.
CfMM even labels as “biased” or “misleading” articles that simply report what others have said, conflating the views of the people being quoted with the position of the journalist or outlet. This includes articles quoting President Macron’s warning about “soft Islamism” in French schools, or a rape victim’s account of being forced into multiple “sharia marriages”, since the use of Islamic terms by those reported on did not conform to CfMM’s interpretation of Islam.
Notably, CfMM has itself conceded that subjectivity is an issue. CfMM’s flagship report, cited by Zara Sultana MP, states: “CfMM acknowledges that the interpretations of whether an article or image or headline is deemed to have breached the 5 metrics [including unfairly linking Muslims or Islam with negative behaviour, or misrepresenting or over-generalising about Muslims or Islam] is open to being subjective.” CfMM has also admitted, as reported in The Guardian, “that the classification of exactly what counts as an anti-Muslim story will ultimately be a subjective decision”.
Furthermore, not only is CfMM’s subjective method of rating articles as “biased” or “misleading” a problem, its lack of transparency is also problematic, for it is impossible to cross reference all the articles analysed by CfMM and independently evaluate their ratings. This lack of transparency matters. It means the statistics themselves are unverifiable.
“Controlling the narrative”: Islamism, terrorism, and grooming gangs’
Perhaps the greatest danger presented by CfMM is its efforts to suppress the reporting of Islamist extremism and terrorism. It refers to the latter as “so-called” Islamist terrorism and claims that the terms “Islamist” and “Islamism” are “used to misrepresent Muslims” and to “smear” them. It cautions on the use of such terms and claims, without foundation, that the term “Islamist” blurs violent and non-violent groups.
Editors and journalists have thus been told to avoid highlighting the ideological and religious drivers of the most serious kind of extremism and terrorism the country faces. It would be naïve and dangerous to follow this advice. CfMM also insists that editors and journalists, when using religious terms, defer to “scholars and experts” of which CfMM no doubt approves but does not name. This amounts to a subtle attempt to control language and influence thinking on important matters of security and social integration.
CfMM’s 2021 report, The British Media’s Coverage of Muslims and Islam (2018-2020), listed Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse as among the “top 3 offenders” for negative coverage of Muslims. Their crime? Reporting factual accounts of Islamist terror attacks that included mentions of the attackers’ slogans or religious motives. CfMM declared that associating Islam or Muslims with negative behaviour automatically counts as bias. By this standard, the media cannot cover Islamist terrorism without being branded Islamophobic.
CfMM claims that the term “Islamist” is routinely misused by the media to delegitimise antagonists in a story. But in practice, it uses this argument to obscure the nature of Islamist movements themselves. CfMM has complained about reports describing Hamas as an Islamist group, despite the fact that Hamas’s own name — Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah — means Islamic Resistance Movement, and its charter explicitly calls for jihad against Israel. CfMM has made similar complaints about French media coverage of organisations like BarakaCity and the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), accusing journalists of “misrepresenting” these institutions as Islamist. Yet both BarakaCity and CCIF were dissolved by France’s highest court for inciting hatred and supporting “radical Islamism”. These are not quibbles about language. They are attempts to sanitise the ideological character of Islamist actors.
CfMM has also tried to discourage reporting on rape and grooming gangs comprised predominantly of Pakistani-origin Muslim men. It has dismissed such reporting as “shoddy journalism” with “shoddy underpinnings”. In its 2023 report on the Grooming Gangs Taskforce, CfMM accused British TV of indulging in “sensationalist” coverage that created a “moral panic” by focusing on the ethnic and religious background of the offenders. The following year, in a separate 2024 report targeting GB News, CfMM attacked the broadcaster for its coverage of “so-called grooming gangs,” alleging that it was part of a wider pattern of “delegitimising Islam and Muslims.” Yet this framing is at odds with a decade of documented cases and multiple official reports.
Most recently, the 2025 Casey Review confirmed that cultural and religious factors were indeed among the drivers of group-based child sexual exploitation. It also found that institutional reluctance to address these factors — fuelled in part by fears of being branded Islamophobic — contributed to systemic failure. But by framing such reporting as “shoddy journalism” or “moral panic” and denouncing brave journalists like Andrew Norfolk and Charlie Peters for exposing these gangs, CfMM helps perpetuate precisely this kind of paralysis.
Seeking influence: regulators, media organisations and universities
CfMM claims to have secured over 100 or over 300 corrections until 2020 — a range so wide it reflects the inconsistent claims it makes about how many media items it monitors. In May 2023, CfMM stated that it had “monitored over 200,000 articles and analysed almost 60,000 online print and broadcast clips”. Earlier, it suggested much higher totals, claiming to monitor “thousands of articles and clips daily,” which — if taken literally — would amount to millions over several years. In 2020, it claimed to have analysed 290,000 articles and broadcast clips. The inconsistency of these figures makes independent verification impossible. But even taking the most generous figures CfMM has provided — 300 corrections out of 260,000 monitored media items — the rate of corrections is barely more than one-tenth of one percent. This hardly demonstrates endemic Islamophobia in the British media.
Despite CfMM’s claims to “have had more wins at IPSO [the Independent Press Standards Organisation] than any other organisation”, a search of the IPSO database, across its seven year existence, records only one complaint upheld by CfMM resulting in a newspaper being required to make a correction.
Yet CfMM’s ambitions do not stop at monitoring headlines and obtaining corrections. It also seeks to influence journalism itself — what is written, read, and ultimately believed.
CfMM has lobbied press regulators to adopt a range of measures that would curtail legitimate expression. It has urged IMPRESS (the Independent Monitor of the Press) not to allow “insults” and “ridicule” of religious beliefs and practices, and urged IPSO to extend its discrimination clause to cover groups — not just individuals. CfMM’s Amanda Morris publicly supported this push, stating that she had personally lobbied IPSO to widen the clause to cover groups, including “mosques” and “religious schools”.
CfMM has also fostered relationships with media organisations like the BBC and contributed to industry consultations. CfMM provided recommendations to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines Consultation in April 2019. In 2022, CfMM announced it would be training BBC journalists and “feeding into the BBC’s terminology guidebook”.
CfMM has also enjoyed some political endorsements. It was launched in July 2019 in Parliament at an event hosted by Naz Shah MP, who was then the Shadow Minister of State for Women and Equalities. On 7 December 2023, Zara Sultana, then the Labour MP for Coventry South, referenced a CfMM report in the House of Commons, citing its alleged findings regarding Islamophobia in the mainstream media. In June 2025, CfMM launched a report in Parliament attacking the BBC’s coverage of Israel-Gaza; the BBC’s director of news content, Richard Burgess, spoke at the event.
Holding the fort for a free press: resisting claims of “Islamophobia”
Editors and journalists should avoid relying on the MCB, CfMM and other self-appointed arbiters of Islamic authenticity to shape how Islam, Islamism, terrorism and extremism are reported. They should also resist self-censoring the language they use to describe Islamist extremists or terrorists, as advised by CfMM. Journalists should not have to worry about being labelled “Islamophobic” if they call out Islamist extremism — whether that involves the application of sharia and the problems this poses for Muslim women; the ethno-religious dimension of group-based child sexual exploitation; or jihadist terrorism. Editors and journalists should avoid media “awareness” training provided by organisations like CfMM, who profess to speak for Muslims or Islam, or claim to uncover and remedy “structural Islamophobia” in the media industry. Editors and journalists should also resist CfMM’s call to hire more journalists on the basis of their faith. This is a truly divisive and dangerous approach to making news.
IPSO should reaffirm that religious beliefs, practices, and institutions — like all ideologies — may be subject to criticism, satire, and ridicule
What about the regulators? Ofcom should require the BBC and other broadcasters to disclose all advice and training from external groups, including CfMM. This should include the identity of trainers, the staff trained, the content, timing and cost of the training, and the nature of any advice given, so that the public can properly assess the influence of such groups.
IPSO should reaffirm that religious beliefs, practices, and institutions — like all ideologies — may be subject to criticism, satire, and ridicule. Proposals to outlaw “insults” or “mockery” of religion, including Islam, risk introducing de facto blasphemy standards into press regulation. IPSO should make clear that its code protects individuals, not belief systems, from harm — and that public interest and freedom of expression remain core principles. IPSO should also reject attempts to expand its discrimination clause, as CfMM wishes, to cover collective identities such as religions, religious communities, or institutions. Its focus should remain on safeguarding individuals from unjust treatment. Similarly, proposals to define “abuse” or “discrimination” at thresholds below those of the law should be rejected; they would undermine legal clarity, reduce editorial freedom, and risk chilling legitimate reporting.
IPSO should also ensure that its rulings are not misrepresented by advocacy organisations. When third parties, such as CfMM, claim regulatory victories or portray IPSO decisions inaccurately in public forums, IPSO should consider issuing clarifications to uphold the integrity of its process and prevent the spread of misinformation. It could also demand that offending bodies like CfMM issue corrections.
Britain’s media faces a growing dilemma. Accusations of Islamophobia have created a dependency loop in which editors feel pressured to prove their sensitivity, often by turning to groups like CfMM. But this makes demands for sensitivity ever more constrictive — promoting a campaign to suppress accurate reporting on some of the biggest security threats to Britain and the West, as well as the ethno-religious dimension of arguably the biggest national scandal Britain has faced in modern times. The APPG’s proposed Islamophobia definition risks formalising this loop, blurring the line between protecting people from bigotry and shielding ideologies from scrutiny. Britain must break this cycle. A free society cannot outsource its understanding of security or religion to activist monitors. It must remain free to describe reality as it is.
