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Shop the collectionWe’ve looked at a year’s worth of the rightwing TV channel’s output and uncovered unhealthy obsessions that paint a distorted picture of modern Britain. Take a deep dive into the looking-glass world of GB News.
Four years after its launch in 2021, GB News is still something of a puzzle. Backed by the hedge fund tycoon Sir Paul Marshall, the channel aims to become the UK’s largest news channel by 2028 – despite indifferent viewing figures and losses totalling more than £100m.
But when you look at GB News’s output, the enigma starts to clear. GB News isn’t really a news channel at all – it’s a factory for rightwing propaganda, where accuracy and integrity go out the window. We’ve accessed a full archive of over a year’s worth of GB News broadcasts to examine how the channel views the world, analysing the most common words that surround key terms such as “migrant”, “English” and “Pakistani”.
Our data shows that the channel offers a dangerously skewed picture of modern Britain, obsessed with the small proportion of people who come to the UK without the right papers and without speaking English, and determined to smear people with links to Pakistan as involved in grooming gangs.
GB News launched at the beginning of an upswell in arrivals to the UK via small boats – a situation the channel was quick to describe as a “migrant crisis”. And it’s been ramping up the rhetoric ever since.
With an owner who has amplified anti-immigrant views – pitting “native European populations” against “fake refugee invaders” – it’s little surprise that presenters on GB News are fixated on irregular migration. But our analysis shows that the word “illegal” is the single most common way the channel describes people arriving in the UK. Shouldering aside every other word in the English language, the adjective “illegal” appears before the words “migrant” or “immigrant” a staggering 53% of the time. And when you include a basket of terms connected to illegality, such as “boat”, “undocumented” and “Calais”, the proportion swells to 66%.
By contrast, “legal” and “skilled” make up only 4% of the words used before “migrant”.
This relentless focus on the people who arrive in the UK without the correct documents bears little relation to the reality. According to government figures, 43,000 people came to the UK via irregular routes in 2024 – less than 10% of the 431,000 people who came to the UK through passport control. Even when you consider people seeking asylum, only a minority arrive in small boats. Between 60% and 70% of applications for asylum come from people already based in the UK.
GB News seems unconcerned by the people who die making the dangerous crossing from France – despite the unending toll of drownings in the Channel, about one per cent of formulations after the terms “migrant” and “immigrant” refer to death. But the broadcaster is much more interested in migrant crime, a preoccupation that becomes clear from the way it talks about Albanians.
In 2022, the number of Albanians arriving in the UK by boat and claiming asylum surged. On GB News this was greeted with a wave of terms linking Albanian people with criminality. About 28% of the words used before “Albanian” are “illegal”, “dangerous”, “deport/ed” and “fighters”. And 44% of the words used after “Albanian” are “criminal”, “drug”, “prisoner”, “gang”, “gangsters” or “terrorists”.
But when you look at Albanian people applying for asylum in 2022, they were far from a dangerous gang of criminals. Most of them were women, and about half of the applications were successful. The authorities suspected many of them had been subject to human trafficking, with the Home Office finding there were “reasonable grounds” to consider over 90% of this group as victims of modern slavery.
GB News may be obsessed with people coming into Britain, but how does it talk about the people who are already here? Judging by the way the channel uses the word “English”, it mostly seems to be concerned about whether people are “English enough”.
Our analysis shows that the most common ways GB News uses the term “English” are both connected with migration: the English language and who is speaking it, as well as the “English Channel” and who is crossing it.
The word “speak” makes up roughly half of the words appearing before “English”. When you add “speaks”, “learning” and “speaking” into the mix, the figure rises to 62%.
But according to the only comprehensive data about how well migrants speak English, this panic is wildly misplaced. Figures from the 2021 England and Wales census show that 90% of residents born abroad say they can speak English well or very well. Even when you consider the group least likely to speak English well – people who have arrived from non-Commonwealth or anglophone countries in the last two years – only 18% say they can’t speak English well or at all.
When it comes to words after “English”, the term “Channel” appears 52% of the time on GB News, dwarfing “people” (9.2%), “language” (6.9%) and “football” (3.8%). Terms that don’t relate to migration – think “breakfast” and “countryside” – don’t even come close.
While GB News is preoccupied with policing Englishness, the channel’s picture of minority communities has been indelibly shaped by crime. In one shocking example, the broadcaster mostly uses the word “Pakistani” in connection with the sexual abuse of children.
Even though our data includes the conflict between Pakistan and India which led news bulletins around the world earlier this year, the most common word following the term “Pakistani” is “rape”, in 19% of formulations. A mere six words associated with sexual violence make up 48% of the terms following the word “Pakistani”: “rape”, “men/man”, “gangs”, “males”, “grooming”, and “paedophile”.
In her 2014 report into the Rotherham grooming gangs, Professor Alexis Jay said that the majority of “known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage.” And Baroness Louise Casey found in June that evidence from three local areas that men of Asian ethnicity are “over-represented as perpetrators in group-based child sexual exploitation” needs “further examination”, and criticised the failure to gather data across the country.
But the data that does exist – published by the Child Sexual Exploitation taskforce – shows that 83% of suspects involved with group-based child sexual exploitation called themselves white, with 7% Asian – 2% less than the proportion of Asian ethnic groups in the 2021 census.
When we asked GB News for a response, the channel criticised our methodology and motivation, and said that we have “understated the importance of both the grooming gangs scandal and the small boats and illegal migration crisis to the British public”.
It also called the data collected by the Child Sexual Exploitation taskforce “bogus” and cited “recent reports and studies” that “demonstrate the vast over-representation of Pakistanis among group-based child sexual exploitation” – though the channel didn’t say whether these reports consider the situation across the whole of the UK.
In a frightening world of “Pakistani rapists”, “Albanian criminals” and “illegal migrants”, which core values provide the most comfort to GB News and its audiences?
In order, the top words before “values” are “British”, “family”, “conservative”, “western” and “Christian” – a set which makes up 65% of the single-word formulations. “Democratic” comes in at 1.6%.
The language used by GB News reveals such a skewed picture of life in Britain that it’s hard to see how it could claim the values vital to any real news channel: accuracy and integrity.
