This interview is part of a series, which asks if newspapers have become Above the Law.
Read & watch further expert views & testimony from the campaign’s homepage.

In 2020, IPSO’s outgoing chairman, Sir Alan Moses, admitted that there was anti-Muslim bias in the media.  In its eight years as a press complaints-handler, IPSO has not  upheld a single complaint against a publisher for racism.

On four separate occasions between 2019 and 2021 The Times was forced to apologise after libelling Muslims with false allegations, and yet still there was no standards investigation from IPSO.

Neelam Rose, Muslim Women Network

Neelam Rose is an award-winning campaigner and an advocacy officer at the Muslim Women’s Network UK.  Neelam spoke to us about the portrayal of Muslim women in the press, and the impact of these headlines on the daily experiences of Muslim women in the UK.

Talking about the portrayal of Muslim women in the press, Neelam says that there is a one dimensional depiction of Muslim women. The overarching view of how Muslim women are being shown in the media is as “oppressed”, “fragile” or unable to have their own opinions and make decisions for themselves. The press rarely presents their achievements or contributions to public life; “they are never celebrated,” she says. 

Often news stories that feature Muslim women will be presented with a stock image of women wearing a Burqa, which has become the “universal image of Muslim women”. Neelam says that this coverage does not reflect her own identity, or the wider identity of Muslim women in the UK.

Neelam said that based on the images which dominate coverage of Muslims in the media, “it’s no wonder Islamophobia is rife”.  While Muslim women are often at the forefront of challenging misogyny, sexism and racism, this is not represented in the press. “We don’t see them or hear them”, she says.

She also explained how coverage can have a personal impact.

It was actually my decision to wear a Hijab… Muslim women can make that decision for themselves. But it wasn’t really my whole decision to remove it. It was the climate that we were living in, in terms of hate crimes…I just didn’t feel safe.”

Neelam says that the overarching view of how Muslim women are portrayed in the media is as “oppressed”, “fragile” or unable to have their own opinions and make decisions for themselves.”

She added, “I do think many newspapers in in this country are institutionally Islamophobic and I think some of the stories that have been put out about Muslim communities and in particular Muslim women have been nothing short of Islamophobic and racist, and actually have a damaging impact on Muslim women and the kind of experiences they have in their own country.  That’s largely due to lazy, racist and Islamophobic journalism.”

Neelam believes that local journalism is key to improving coverage and standards.  

“Whether in politics, sports, arts or the NHS, local journalism does a far better job at portraying the achievements of Muslim women in a way that the national press could learn from,” she says. 

And when addressing issues that involve Muslim women, Neelam suggested that the press take an intersectional approach (which takes into account gender and other attributes, as well as religion and race).

When the experiences of Muslim women are discussed by the media, it is often by a panel of Muslim men. “Often I have seen that on news shows and even in newspapers, they get one comment [from] a male Muslim leader who shouldn’t be speaking for Muslim women, because we’re capable of speaking for ourselves.”

The portrayal of all Muslim women as homogenous also needs to be addressed.  “We are all very, very different based on race, on class, on the jobs that we have, on sexuality”.

Neelam points out that this is due, in part, to the lack of diversity in newsrooms.

But she has more praise for the local press which, she says, often does a much better job maintaining relationships with local organisations and charities as well as attending community events.  This creates a connection between the paper and the communities they are reporting on.

“I hope to see more Muslim women that are local journalists.  I think it’d be really good to see because in a way you have equity so you can represent your issues and your community better if it’s not done nationally.”

Brian Cathcart, journalist, academic & campaigner

In 2019, alongside Paddy French, Brian Cathcart studied three reports written by The Times’ chief investigative reporter, which Cathcart considers gave a “threatening” depiction of Muslims.  The coverage was “likely to cause fear towards Muslims at a time when there was an increase in hate crimes. It was a time that you would think a national newspapers would be taking extreme care not to stoke hatred.”

The Times’ distorted coverage of Muslims was not limited to the three stories that Brian and Paddy covered.  Subsequent to their report, the paper published two further stories which “were forced to settle on challenges of libel and both involving Muslim people.”

At the time these stories were being published, Brian observes, “Muslim people in the UK were experiencing unprecedented levels of harassment, violent harassment at times, and abuse”. The decision to publish these stories against the backdrop of that climate shows – at best – irresponsibility and carelessness.

“We argued in our report back in 2019 that The Times newspaper should face an independent investigation, and that’s because no internal investigation would do really. First of all the editor personally had backed all this. Secondly, the editorial columns of the newspaper had consistently defended [the journalist’s] work and we thought that you couldn’t trust an organisation that would do that to investigate itself.”

But IPSO is also not the right organisation to investigate a newspaper for misconduct.

Brian says, “The truth is we need IPSO to be canned altogether, because IPSO is the puppet of the newspapers. It is exactly the problem that the Leveson Inquiry identified of the newspaper industry marking its own homework.”

Brian says that Clause 12 of IPSO’s code, which deals with discrimination, should be reformed and highlighted the fact that across the entire British press IPSO has never identified “a single case of discrimination the grounds of race or religion” and he says it is obvious that this is unlikely to change under the present terms.

He says the writer of many of these articles was the same journalist who achieved fame through his coverage of Asian grooming gangs in Rotherham.  Since then, a false narrative has developed, that there is a unique culture of grooming and rape within the Pakistani-heritage community in the UK, particularly towards abusing white girls. In December 2020, The Home Office under Priti Patel produced a report which confirmed that “group-based offenders are most commonly White ” and found there to be no credible evidence that supported the claim that there was an “over-representation” of one ethnic group in cases of child exploitation.

In 2015, Muhsin Ahmed, an 81 year old man of Yemeni heritage, was punched, kicked and stamped on in an unprovoked attack by two white racists in Rotherham and died 11 days later as a result of his injuries. One of the men called him a “groomer” as the attack was being carried out. Brian Cathcart said that the idea of associating Asian men with grooming originated in The Times’ journalism.  “The Times… should have been showing more care about these things and certainly the world should know more about what happened to Muhsin Ahmed than it does.”

Tell your MP that newspapers shouldn’t be above the law.