A year long investigation into GB News by The Good Law Project has found that the channel mostly links Pakistanis with the sexual abuse of children.
The investigation by the organisation, which takes legal action and campaigns to “fight against hate and spread hope,” found that the broadcaster uses the word “Pakistani” in connection with “rape” 19% of the time.
Six other words associated with sexual violence make up 48% of the terms connected with the word “Pakistani” – “rape,” “men/man,” “gangs,” “males,” “grooming” and “paedophile”.
The Good Law Project said: “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… 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.”
Data 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.
But group-based offending is only 4.6% of all sexual offences against children which means that 95.4% of offenders are not Pakistani men.
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‘Illegal immigrants’
Moreover, the analysis showed that the word “illegal” is the single most common way the channel describes people arriving in the UK.
The adjective “illegal” appears before the words “migrant” or “immigrant” 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.”
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.
The Good Law Project said: “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.”
About 28% of the words the channel 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, 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.
“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,” The Good Law Project concluded.
When The Good Law Project asked GB News for a response, the channel criticised their methodology and motivation, and said that they had “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.”
