Media coverage of Muslims in the West can be vicious. The extreme anti-Muslim views spread by Breitbart right-wing news website, formerly managed by Trump Chief Strategist Steven Bannon, are at the heart of the growing Islamophobia in America.
Meanwhile, tabloids in the UK regularly publish vitriolic and alarmist stories about the British Muslim community, which usually go unchallenged by unthinking readers.
Hoping to change all of that, one British Muslim has begun a one-man crusade against false stories and misleading headlines about his religious community.
Miqdaad Versi is the Assistant Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain. That’s his day job, but in his spare time Versi has an ambitious personal project: ridding coverage of Islam in the British media of inaccuracies.
Having corrected mistakes on an ad-hoc basis for a while, Versi began a concerted effort to closely monitor reporting in December. He has since developed an in-depth spreadsheet of all stories related to Muslims coming out of the UK, and has made more than 50 complaints.
A quick look through his Twitter feed soon reveals the fruits of his labor.
In December, Versi corrected articles which had claimed a government review had found that Muslims saw the UK as 75 percent Muslim. In fact, this was a false report based on a rumor; the real figure was that in one British school the young students thought their country was made up of 50-90 percent people of Asian backgrounds.
The Sunday Times completely changes its article authored by Gilligan et al on British Muslims following my complainthttps://t.co/6N33V4jAAy pic.twitter.com/QkZETJspGh
— Miqdaad Versi (@miqdaad) December 23, 2016
Versi also ensured a change when the Sun on Sunday tabloid newspaper confused an extremist with an anti-extremism campaigner in what he described to the BBC as “quite a mix-up.”
The Sun on Sunday apologises for mixing up 2 black people: ISIS-supporter & "respected counter-radicalisation activist" after my complaint pic.twitter.com/iW9uslKZMq
— Miqdaad Versi (@miqdaad) December 18, 2016
Perhaps his most high-profile victory was securing an apology from right-wing paper the Daily Mail over false accusations against of terrorism a British Muslim family by well-known columnist Katie Hopkins.
Despite being at 2.07am, important to highlight Katie Hopkins' lie about a Muslim family in the Daily Mail #StopFundingHate https://t.co/Tqw6TOUAfk
— Miqdaad Versi (@miqdaad) December 19, 2016
"Nobody else was doing this," Versi told the BBC earlier this month. "There have been so many articles about Muslims overall that have been entirely inaccurate, and they create this idea within many Muslim communities that the media is out to get them.”
Despite his progress, securing 12 corrections in just two months, the campaigner thinks there is still a long way to go.
"Sometimes the corrections lack a clear acknowledgement of the error they made and often do not include an apology. In addition, they are rarely given the prominence of the original article," he says.
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