Andrew Gilligan has worked at the BBC, the Telegraph, the Sunday Times, City Hall and Downing Street. Today he writes for The Spectator and Policy Exchange, and his main subject is British Muslims. This dossier sets out his career, what he writes, what the NewsCord Watchdog found in it and the people he has written about.
Nima Akram
Kévin T. admitted he chose his victims by how Muslim or African they looked, in a town he called "a haven for Islamists". We read 90 English-language articles from 41 outlets. They folded the killing into the protests, called it random, and 32 of the 41 never reported his confession.
Nima Akram
We examined 920 headlines about El-Sayed from 141 outlets and 740 stored articles. Fox and the Post carried the smear from August onwards and almost never told their readers it had nothing behind it. The charts compare headline subjects, who made the allegations and whether the articles assessed the evidence.
Nima Akram
The government said the man who wrote its antisemitism review was independent, with no conflict of interest. He was being paid by a government agency. In 2005 he singled out Muslim schools as a challenge to "our coherence as a nation", and a charity whose one firm policy is opposing boycotts of Israel has named him on its council since at least 2016. We followed the money.
Nima Akram
The protests began on 21 September at one school near Paris, over teaching posts nobody had filled. We read 734 English-language reports from 164 outlets. On the day 550,000 people marched, 73% led on the violence, 42% never said the marches were peaceful, and only two gave any number for injured protesters.
Nima Akram
For some reason, people still want to defend it
Matt Benson
A UCL student wrote that Somalis are inbred and that Britain should mass deport Muslims. His classmates reported him in April 2026. UCL has told them the case is complex and promised an outcome before term starts on 28 September. In November 2025 UCL needed two days. The law sorted message by message, UCL's own code, and three things UCL should do now.
On the 25th anniversary of 11 September the Washington Times reported that Trump had vowed victory over 'Islamic terror'. He had not said it; the paper did. The Quran forbids the killing of the innocent and makes the spreading of terror a capital crime, and the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, al-Azhar, the Amman Message's 200 scholars and the 126 signatories of the letter to al-Baghdadi have all said so. Nobody wrote 'Christian terror' over Oslo, Colorado Springs or Finsbury Park, and nobody should have. We counted the phrase in Google Books and in five years of English-language news, set six killers who invoked their own religion beside the words the press used for them, and put the security figures that cut the other way on the page. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
Corrections, apologies and settlements involving Muslim people and institutions form part of Andrew Gilligan's record. We counted all 42 articles in his recent Spectator archive and tracked seven Cambridge articles in 21 days, including pieces about Muslim educators and a Black college leader. He wrote that every other non-academic head of house had out-achieved Simon Woolley, and named none of them, so we named all eleven and checked what the job actually requires. Every outcome is linked in a 24-record ledger.
A water project engaged eleven communities, from Jewish mikvahs to Sikh gurdwaras, and made 42 recommendations, most aimed at everyone or at the water companies themselves. Three national outlets cropped it to the two about Muslims and Asians and printed an instruction that exists in no document, never engaging the report's cost or evidence: the communities were the story that fit the narrative. The same week, 22 of 25 headlines turned a Home Office collection about housing, victims' rights and child safety into a rape story, without one offending statistic, because the state does not measure it and is in court to keep the nearest proxy unpublished. Both censuses published article by article.
A parody that applies the exact statistical method behind the '250,000 victims' figure to the native British population and 'proves' 34 million are violent tribal gang members. If the method is worthless here, it was worthless there. The serious point, and the government's own evidence that most child sexual abuse in Britain is committed by white men inside families and online, follows the joke.
Rupert Lowe's Rape Gang Inquiry Report anchors on a figure of 250,000. It was never counted. It is a 2018 House of Lords guess: Rotherham's 1,400 (every form of child sexual exploitation, of every background) scaled across the country and relabelled 'white girls raped by Muslim gangs'. A forensic account of how the number, the ethnic-to-religious switch, and the fabricated 'meat' hadith were manufactured, and what happens when a lie about a whole religion reaches millions.
Two stabbings, radically asymmetric coverage. Measured in a like-for-like first-72-hour window, the national press covered the Golders Green stabbing of two Jewish men several times more than the Edinburgh attacks that wounded five, several of them Muslim, and reached for 'terror' far more often (Edinburgh was reported as 'suspected', 'faith-based hate', or a 'knifeman'). And the newsroom gap mirrors a government gap: an emergency COBRA meeting, threat-level rise, PM visit and £25m for one, none of it for the other.
Two incidents at the 16 May 2026 'Unite the Kingdom' rally, and the press's flattening of the day into 'rival protests'. The legal framework stated accurately, the framing critique graded outlet by outlet, the honest counter-arguments, and the asks.
Prince Harry's New Statesman op-ed condemned antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred as twin manifestations of the same well of division. Within 24 hours, eight major Western outlets had reduced the balanced argument to a one-sided statement on antisemitism alone.
Crime is at record lows. But the misinformation is at record highs. How politicians and media weaponise fabricated stats to stoke fear, blame immigration, and target Muslims.
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