A coordinated smear campaign targeting high-profile British photographer and Southbank Centre chair Misan Harriman by right-wing UK news outlets has triggered an unprecedented wave of public complaints to the nation’s media regulator, shattering all previous records for public pushback against inaccurate press coverage.
The public complaint drive, organized by media accountability platform NewsCord, crossed the 50,000-submission mark in just 48 hours after launching, and has now collected more than 80,000 signatures demanding regulatory action. This total triples the earlier all-time high of roughly 25,000 complaints submitted to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) over Jeremy Clarkson’s 2022 defamatory column about Meghan Markle in *The Sun*, marking a historic moment for public demands for press accountability in the UK.
The campaign against Harriman, an Oscar-nominated photographer, long-time social justice activist and prominent pro-Palestine voice, erupted after he posted two pieces of content to social media earlier this month. First, he raised a factual question after a late April stabbing attack in London’s Golders Green: why had both police and most mainstream media outlets failed to mention that the attack included a third victim, a Muslim man, when coverage uniformly focused only on the two Jewish men stabbed later the same day? Second, he shared a short video reflecting on Reform UK’s strong local election performance, which included a contextual quote from iconic Jewish-American writer Susan Sontag about human behavior and political extremism.
Right-wing outlets distorted both posts to manufacture false accusations against Harriman. They labeled his factual observation about the unreported third victim a baseless “conspiracy theory,” despite clear evidence backing his claim: the Metropolitan Police’s official public statement about the attack only referenced two victims, and major outlets including Sky News, Channel 5 and the BBC all omitted the Muslim victim from their initial headlines. Outlets then took Sontag’s quote, pulled from Harriman’s video completely out of context, and falsely claimed he had compared Reform voters to Nazis.
Within a single week, four major right-wing outlets – *The Telegraph*, the Daily Mail, GB News and the Daily Express – published near-identical hit pieces repeating these false claims, with Reform UK MP Robert Jenrick publicly calling for Harriman to be removed from his post as chair of the publicly funded Southbank Centre.
The smear campaign has sparked widespread backlash across British public life. More than 250 high-profile celebrities have signed an open letter organized by the non-profit Good Law Project backing Harriman, with signatories including Gary Lineker, Louis Theroux, Annie Lennox, Greta Thunberg and Mark Ruffalo. As of press time, the open letter has gathered more than 15,000 total signatures from members of the public.
The open letter condemns the campaign as “entirely without foundation in fact,” noting its core goal is to “traduce and marginalise Misan” and send a warning to other public figures that speaking out on contentious issues will result in targeted harassment. It adds: “We believe that safeguarding freedom of expression is essential to a healthy democracy. And that trying to silence critics of Israel by smearing them as antisemitic does not protect Britain’s Jewish community.”
A separate cross-party group of 20 UK parliamentarians has also written to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to denounce the coordinated attack. The lawmakers note that outlets selectively edited Harriman’s words to “whipping up a furore to engineer an ever-growing environment of cancel culture,” adding that the campaign, led by right-wing media and backed by right-wing politicians, aims to close open debate and further marginalize minority communities. Signatories of the parliamentary letter include crossbench peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Labour MPs John McDonnell and Naz Shah, and Green Party co-leaders Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer. The letter also raises alarms about a growing trend of pressuring public institutions to cut ties with figures engaging in legitimate political discourse, a practice that deepens social division rather than fostering cohesion.
Nima Akram, founder of NewsCord, told Middle East Eye that the coordinated nature of the hit pieces is no accident: the outlets share a common political project focused on “weakening publicly-funded culture, attacking pro-Palestine voices, and using cultural figures as proxies for pressuring Labour into right-wing policy.” Akram stressed that Ipso has a clear responsibility to investigate the campaign, arguing that if the regulator cannot enforce its own accuracy rules against a misinformation drive of this scale, UK press regulation is effectively meaningless. If outlets are allowed to get away with defaming a Black pro-Palestine activist for asking a factually correct question and quoting a well-known writer, Akram said, it will set a dangerous precedent that creates a playbook for silencing all dissenting voices in public life.
For his part, Harriman pushed back against the smears, saying: “We have reached the point where truth itself is being crushed by the very institutions that are supposed to uphold it. I will never whisper about the oppressed. I stand with truth, I stand by my right to use my voice to help others.” A veteran social justice advocate, Harriman serves as an ambassador for Save the Children, was nominated for Amnesty UK’s People’s Human Rights Champion award, and has long advocated against genocide in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gaza. He is also widely known for his photography of pro-Palestine ceasefire marches, including a viral 2024 image of a Muslim man and a Jewish man holding a joint ceasefire sign that was auctioned to raise funds for Palestinian aid.
NewsCord is formally calling on Ipso to launch a full investigation into all four outlets involved in the smear campaign, and to require the outlets to issue public acknowledgements and corrections of their misleading reporting.