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
Britain's papers have made the Board of Deputies the voice of British Jews on Palestine. They print its attacks on Palestine solidarity as the Jewish community's verdict, never tell readers its constitution commits it to "advance Israel's security, welfare and standing", and shut Palestinians out of stories about their own land.
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
Sir David Bell's review used it to say a view held by 45% of British adults, that Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated Jews, could be antisemitic. It was committed to the definition before it heard any evidence. A charity whose one firm policy is opposing boycotts of Israel lists Bell on its council. Four of 37 reports told readers what the definition says about Israel.
Nima Akram
Between 1 and 20 October, 37 British national outlets covered one motion at one party conference. Israel's government alone got more words than every Palestinian put together, and 2,422 of the Palestinian words sat in stories tying the motion's author to al-Qaeda. Not one of 89 comment pieces backed the motion. Not one headline said genocide.
Nima Akram
For some reason, people still want to defend it
Matt Benson
Henry Hopwood-Phillips pleaded guilty in June. We can find no report of it until a Daily Mail story about Michael Gove's former partner on 13 October, and by that evening the Mail had rewritten its line about The Critic. The Critic loses about £1 million a year and stays open on its owner's money. It has not said a word.
A charge heard in open court is public, and the law protects fair and accurate reports of it. The Telegraph and the Daily Mail reported that a Telegraph columnist is to stand trial, then deleted their reports within two days, and the Spectator, edited by Michael Gove, deleted her column. The same papers kept all 100 pieces they ran on Jason Arday, who was never charged with any crime. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
Green Party members voted 1,022 to 813 that Zionism is racism. The Telegraph printed 'hunted down' as Lubna Speitan's words though they came from an anonymous X account, headlined a 'good friend' nobody named, and left out that her legal challenge made the Met look again at war crimes accusations against Britons who served in Gaza. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
On 21 August 2026 Cambridge said its Black students and staff were still being sent racist, hateful and abusive messages. Six days later senior Black academics told Black staff they could come to them for support and advice. The Telegraph reported the offer under an accusation of breaking equality law. The word abuse appears nowhere in its article, which leaves out the law that allows the support, gives the accusation to anonymous academics and contradicts its own headline in its last paragraph.
At 11:22 on 7 October 2023 the Gaza Division of the Israeli occupation forces told its units that not a single vehicle could return to Gaza, and at 11:59 Southern Command ordered any withdrawal stopped at any cost. The Israeli occupation's own investigations and memorial records put 13 deaths down to Israeli fire, and the IOF decided its safety department would not investigate the rest. The BBC has not named the Hannibal Directive in three years. We read 4,367 articles by 28 Western outlets from the week after the attack: 49.4% condemned it in their own words and 0.7% condemned the Israeli occupation's killing in Gaza. Of 144 articles that carried false atrocity claims, not one has been corrected or taken down. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
Green Party members voted 1,022 to 813 to treat Zionism as racism and to back one democratic state with equal rights for all. We counted every word of 15 reports by the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail, the wires and others, by whose position each word carried. Opponents got 5,632 words and supporters 620. Eight of the ten reports that quoted the single-state clause cut it before equal rights for all, none of 22 headlines named Palestinians, Gaza or genocide, and the Telegraph rewrote its evening headline to carry Israel's accusation of terrorism. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
On 16 September 2026 the Los Angeles Times published a paid travel page branded by Israel's Ministry of Tourism. Its map draws the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights as Israel, and the ads send readers to nine sites on occupied land without once using the word occupied. The Times's own news pages call that land occupied. We are asking the Times to take the ads down: a corrected version would still sell holidays on occupied land.
We followed the money behind the outlets that set the agenda in America and Britain: who owns them, where they are incorporated and taxed, what their owners have given, signed or said about Israel, and what they did with the megaphone. Seven owners take more than half of all visits to the top 50 US news sites. The Ellisons own CBS News and The Free Press, hold 15 per cent of TikTok US and have a court-frozen deal for CNN. Amazon holds Israel's $1.2bn military cloud contract. Axel Springer makes support for Israel a written condition of employment and, since June 2026, owns the Daily Telegraph. In Britain the papers that generalise most about Muslims are owned from Delaware, Berlin, Dubai and Bermuda. The thread is a chequebook and a political project, not a religion, and most of the men holding it are not Jewish. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
Edieal Pinker's study of 1,559 New York Times articles on Israel's genocide in Gaza is being reported as proof of anti-Israel bias. Its headline finding is that the Times did not remind readers of 7 October in every article. It never divides by the dead. Using the paper's own tables and the Gaza Ministry of Health count, a dead Israeli got 25 times the coverage of a dead Palestinian, a dead Israeli soldier 16 times, and one hostage more articles than a thousand Palestinian dead. The ministry count is a floor: the Lancet puts the true toll 41 per cent higher, which widens the gap to about 40 to 1. We also set out the author's own record on Israel and Gaza, who read his drafts, and who is promoting the result. By Nima Akram.
Nima Akram
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
The reporters who made Jason Arday a national story say Cambridge and education are their beat. James Orr is on that beat: an associate professor, filmed by Channel 4 arranging for a US company to pay for Reform UK's polling, stood down the next morning, under university examination the same day and now under a Metropolitan Police investigation. We time-matched the first week of each story across the same fifteen outlets: 163 articles about Arday, 13 about Orr and 92 more that name him inside a Reform story. Then we went byline by byline: the 15 journalists who led the Arday coverage wrote 0 of them. Andrew Gilligan wrote two more Cambridge pieces after Orr stood down, about Simon Woolley and the Arday inquiry, and neither names him. Every article listed and linked.
A magazine told the first Black man to head an Oxbridge college that he is not fit for the job. The people he has actually taught, mentored, hired and argued with were never asked. This is a living board where they answer under their own names: anyone can add one, every email is verified, and a person reads every entry before it appears. Nothing here is anonymous.
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.
On 21 August a jury unanimously acquitted Tony Greenstein, a 72-year-old Jewish anti-Zionist, of a terrorism charge over Gaza posts. No national outlet reported the verdict until Gary Lineker reshared a clip of his speech outside court, and then the story was Lineker's 'true views'. A census of all 24 substantive Lineker articles this week: six about the repost, none in his defence, every accusation coded by whether it is asserted as fact, run as signed opinion or attributed to others, and mapped against the line defamation law draws. With the quote wall, the omissions scoreboard and every article listed and linked.
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