The directors present their report and the financial statements for the year ended 31 July 2025.
The directors are responsible for keeping adequate accounting records that are sufficient to show and explain the company's transactions and disclose with reasonable accuracy at any time the financial position of the company and enable them to ensure that the financial statements comply with the Companies Act 2006. They are also responsible for safeguarding the assets of the company and hence for taking reasonable steps for the prevention and detection of fraud and other irregularities.
Director’s Report for the Annual Accounts
Introduction
Democracy depends on accurate and reliable media, yet the rise of online advertising has made it easier than ever for ‘bad actors’ to spread and profit from misinformation and hate.
The resulting global surge in toxic online content demonising minority groups has helped to fuel the rise of far right ideologies which thrive on spreading hatred and division, threatening democracy and human rights worldwide. Meanwhile the proliferation of disinformation has been a gift to those seeking to undermine climate science and block climate action, worsening the devastation already being caused by climate change, and putting the survival of human civilisation at risk.
Reliable Media’s long-term goal is to bring about more responsible media by making hate and misinformation unprofitable and tackling the wider systemic problems that have created a global disinformation crisis.
In the meantime we seek to reduce the harms of problematic media and shift the financial incentives in a more positive direction.
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We do this by:
● Engaging with advertisers through our #StopFundingHeat and #StopFundingHate campaigns, which mobilise people via social media and other online channels to urge companies to pull their ads from problematic media.
● Challenging and discrediting media that spread misinformation and hate, reducing the effectiveness of their messages.
● Building solidarity and support for organisations and individuals facing threats, online abuse and intimidation after being targeted by hostile media.
Strategic Shifts and Impacts 2024/25
One organisation- integrated campaigns
The financial year 2024/25 has been a transformative one for Reliable Media. In August 2024, the core campaigning activities of Stop Funding Hate were transferred to Reliable Media from Stop Funding Hate CIC. Both the Stop Funding Heat and Stop Funding Hate campaigns now sit under the Reliable Media “umbrella,” enabling us to operate with greater strategic coherence and – crucially – to highlight the link between media and hateful political rhetoric, previously impossible under CIC restrictions around campaigning activities.
Yet the large-scale racist violence that took place in Britain during the same month brought a stark reminder of why we do this work – and why this change was needed. The racist riots were widely seen to have been fuelled both by inflammatory media narratives and toxic political rhetoric, as well as misinformation and racist hatred spread via social media.
Financial Impact on GB News
A major focus for both Stop Funding Hate and Stop Funding Heat continued to be GB News. GB News coverage has been extreme even by UK media standards – spreading hate narratives and downplaying climate risks.
Our integrated campaigns achieved measurable impact, with the channel’s accounts revealing losses exceeding £33 million in the 2023/2024 financial year - and confirmed cumulative total losses of £100 million since 2021 – amid ongoing complaints from GB News presenters about the impact of Stop Funding Hate’s campaign: GB News admits that the #StopFundingHate campaign is working - YouTube
Advertiser wins
Our monitoring found that over 90 advertisers quietly withdrew from the channel since November 2024. Notably, the vast majority of companies chose not to publicly acknowledge their departure or when they had pulled their ads. This points to a chilling effect in which the far right’s capacity to intimidate is not only shaping where corporate money flows, but whether companies are willing to speak out and defend progressive values.
One significant win was in February 2025 which saw one of Stop Funding Hate’s biggest supporter mobilisations in several years, with thousands of people taking action after Marks and Spencer were found to be advertising on GB News radio. Although there was no public statement from the company, M&S advertising disappeared from GB News in early March and – and at the time of writing – has not been seen since.
Expanding our media monitoring system
The expansion of our GB News campaign has been supported by our in house media monitoring system, which we’ve significantly improved and upgraded over the past 12 months. This has enabled much more detailed tracking of GB News output. That in turn has strengthened our ability to make the case to advertisers about the channel’s toxic character and raise the alarm more widely about the harm being done by its coverage.
One key priority has been to respond to a disturbing uptick in extreme rhetoric targeting migrants, refugees, Muslims, trans people and other minority communities, both on GB News and in other UK media. In December 2024, the Muslim Council of Britain accused GB News of “a deeply concerning pattern of bias and misinformation targeting Muslims. From perpetuating harmful tropes to framing Muslims as threats, GB News appears to be fuelling hatred and further dividing Britain.” In January 2025, a trans contributor quit GB News after a presenter made comments associating the LGBTQ+ community with paedophilia. This prompted thousands of complaints to Ofcom.
Our GB News data has featured in a number of media reports this year, including a hard-hitting piece from Byline Times highlighting the rise in dangerous anti-migrant rhetoric on the channel: GB News Ramps Up Migrant 'Invasion' Rhetoric as Channel Veers Far Right – Byline Times
We also worked with Good Law Project to produce a detailed analysis of the damaging tropes on the channel, using the new analysis tools we developed this year:
GB News: The skewed language that fuels a propaganda factory | Good Law Project
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Thanks to our increased capacity and the improvements to our media monitoring system, we have fully extended our monitoring to cover Talk Radio, whose coverage has also been a source of growing concern. Through our monitoring we have identified dozens of examples of biased and misleading coverage from both GB News and Talk Radio downplaying the risks of climate change and undermining climate action.
Via the Stop Funding Heat campaign we worked with DeSmog on a series of articles, including an in-depth analysis of Talk Radio’s climate coverage, based on our monitoring data: Murdoch-Owned TalkRadio Airs Anti-Climate Attacks Six Times a Day - DeSmog.
Stop Funding Heat submitted a series of complaints about this coverage to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom.
Regulatory – Our Ofcom campaign
Our media monitoring tool has been essential to our ability to support regulatory complaints. Over the course of the year, Stop Funding Heat submitted a series of complaints to Ofcom about climate misinformation on both GB News and Talk Radio, while Stop Funding Hate worked with Good Law Project to submit over 70,000 complaints about homophobic hate broadcast by GB News.
However, the regulator's response has been a source of growing concern. Despite multiple complaints to Ofcom, including clear breaches of the Broadcasting Code, the regulator remained reluctant to take action. During the year, we began exploring ways to escalate the issue with Parliament, which oversees Ofcom and holds scrutiny power over the regulator. However, in May 2025, an Ofcom evidence session in parliament saw the committee chair dismiss serious concerns about broadcasting standards - reinforcing a pattern of inaction that has been a recurring theme throughout the year.
This experience has prompted a deliberate shift in our approach. While we continue to use formal regulatory channels, we have increasingly focused on publicly exposing both the harmful content being broadcast and the regulator's failure to act on it. Our monitoring data has enabled us to document, for example, how GB News has relentlessly promoted a grooming gangs narrative linked to the Pakistani community — with specific inflammatory phrases appearing hundreds of times over a matter of months, in clear breach of established journalistic codes against making an issue of perpetrators' ethnicity.
Rather than relying on Ofcom to identify and act on these patterns, we are now proactively sharing this evidence with journalists, parliamentarians and civil society partners- positioning the data as an accountability tool aimed at both the broadcaster and the regulator. This shift from complaint-making to public accountability reflects a wider lesson from the year: working within the system remains important, but where the system is failing, it must itself be challenged.
Partners and allies
Partnership working continued to be an important aspect of our work. In February 2025, we established a formal partnership with Good Law Project which has enabled both organisations to identify opportunities for joint action and amplify each other’s campaign targeting of GB News and other media outlets.
In March, we collaborated with the founder of Trans History Week Marty Davies, who wrote a hard-hitting article in the UK’s leading advertising industry publication, Campaign, highlighting GB News’s repeated targeting of trans and LGBTQ+ people. The column also challenged Sky over its role brokering ad sales for GB News, and advertising on the channel directly – both adding to the pressure on Sky and sending a clear signal to other companies about the brand risks of associating with GB News.
In June 2025, we launched a joint Pride Month campaign targeting online advertisers on the GB News website. We focused on companies making public LGBTQ+ inclusion statements while advertising on the channel. The campaign generated 10,000+ signatures
Ahead of Pride Month in June, Stop Funding Hate launched a joint campaign with Good Law Project targeting companies who had made positive statements about LGBTQ+ inclusion but had also advertised on the GB News website. Alongside encouraging these advertisers to exclude GB News from their online advertising, our goal was to raise awareness with agencies and brands more broadly – and encourage others to proactively exclude the channel. This received an additional boost when our work was again featured in Campaign – this time in a news piece highlighting our joint action with Good Law Project targeting GB News’s online advertisers.
Over the course of the year, Stop Funding Hate has been working with partners in the migration and refugee sector on a new collaborative project exploring how corporate campaigning tactics can be applied more widely to challenge the companies and media outlets that enable and profit from anti-migrant policies. The project, provisionally titled "Bad Actors", is still developing but there are encouraging signs of progress: by the end of 2025, a date had been set and funding secured for an initial workshop with refugee and migrant organisations to explore options.
Solidarity – behind the scenes support
Following the upsurge in online and abuse against charities supporting migrants and refugees, we have also been piloting a new “early warning system” which automatically alerts us if an organisation we know is mentioned on GB News or Talk Radio, so that we can warn them.
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This is significant because we’ve seen a repeated pattern in which charities targeted by one of these channels have then been inundated with online abuse and threats. If we can alert an organisation at the earliest possible stage, this can both help them to prepare and help contextualise any abuse or threats which follow.
Alongside this behind-the-scenes support, we have also used our social media channels to amplify individual responses from organisations who have been targeted and encouraged #StopFundingHate supporters to show solidarity.
The feedback we’ve had from a number of groups has been that, together with the practical benefits of our early warning system, knowing that another organisation was looking out for them also helped to maintain morale amid attacks they were facing.
Challenging Twitter
Amid ongoing concerns about Elon Musk’s use of Twitter / X to spread extremist content, in September we began stepping up our efforts to persuade advertisers to pull from the platform.
While the algorithmic nature of online advertising makes it more difficult to track Twitter’s advertisers comprehensively, two brands that we identified when we began stepping up the campaign - Hellofresh and Flixbus - have not reappeared in our monitoring.
Given that Musk has pursued vexatious legal cases against a number of groups who have targeted Twitter advertisers (while simultaneously claiming to be a free speech champion), we have taken out enhanced legal insurance which - while still limited - would allow us to fight any such claim and seek to get it struck out.
Despite the legal risks, the scale of Musk’s efforts to shift the boundaries of acceptable discourse - and the limits of what advertisers are prepared to align themselves with - together with his particular focus on the UK (including showing support for extremist figures such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon - aka Tommy Robinson) makes this something that we believe we must tackle.
We also know from speaking to other groups working in this space that Elon Musk’s aggressive response to criticism has had a significant “chilling effect” and led to a reduction in organisations willing to shine a light on the extent of hate and misinformation on Twitter.
The campaign is still developing, but we have already identified a list of prominent organisations who have recently been advertising on Twitter - including high-profile brands like Apple, Google, Dell and the UK’s National Lottery - and begun targeting specific advertisers.
This new focus has also created opportunities to connect with other organisations who have concerns about Twitter and big tech more broadly - including Amnesty UK and the People vs Big Tech coalition. Given that Twitter is a global platform - and that many of the issues on the site which affect the UK are also impacting other countries in Europe and across the world.
Our supporter community
Our supporters remain at the heart of our work, and this year has seen significant growth in both the size and engagement of our supporter base. In August 2024, shortly after the racist riots, we conducted a supporter survey to better understand the motivations and priorities of our community. Anti-migrant rhetoric in the Daily Mail and other tabloids continued to be a key concern, alongside the vilification of asylum seekers and refugees and the normalisation of far-right language in mainstream discourse. The survey also highlighted a clear appetite for more practical tools — including guidance and templates to help supporters message advertisers directly. As one respondent put it: "Organisations such as Stop Funding Hate give me a small measure of hope that not all is lost. Thank you."
This feedback has informed our approach to supporter communications throughout the year, and we have invested in strengthening the quality and consistency of our messaging including bringing in a freelance copywriter and developing a more distinctive editorial voice across our supporter emails and social media channels. Research conducted with Cardiff University also provided valuable demographic and motivational data that will continue to shape our communications strategy going forward.
In October 2024, Stop Funding Hate launched its first petition under the new structure, which helped to grow the email list by several hundred new subscribers. A further boost came in early 2025 when an online petition targeting Sky- boosted by video clips from our monitoring team - drove a significant wave of new sign-ups, with large numbers of petitioners opting in to receive ongoing communications. By the end of the year, Stop Funding Hate had also launched a WhatsApp channel to enable more direct and responsive communication with supporters.
Fundraising
The work of Stop Funding Hate and Stop Funding Heat is made possible through the generous donations of our supporters and funding partners, and we are hugely grateful to everyone who has backed our work again this year.
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During 2024/25 we were fortunate to secure a number of significant new grants. In March 2025, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation approved £200,000 in flexible core funding for Reliable Media. We also secured significant renewed funding from the KR Foundation for Stop Funding Heat's climate-focused work.
In January 2025, we launched a crowdfunder highlighting the threat of GB News importing Donald Trump's media playbook to Britain. The campaign featured a video of GB News presenter Nigel Farage complaining about the impact Stop Funding Hate had been having - which resonated strongly with supporters. The crowdfunder exceeded its initial target within two weeks, passed its stretch target of £15,000, and ultimately closed at £24,700. The comments left by donors on the page provided a valuable qualitative picture of what is motivating people to support our work and will help inform our longer-term individual giving strategy.
Looking ahead, we recognise that growing our individual giving income is essential to the organisation's long-term sustainability. Work is underway to develop a regular giving strategy that can convert the energy and commitment of our supporter community into a more reliable income stream.
Governance and organisational development
The transition to Reliable Media has been accompanied by significant investment in governance and organisational infrastructure over the course of the year.
In early 2024, a governance working group was established to drive through the transition of Stop Funding Hate to its new legal structure, which completed in August 2024. In September, the combined boards of Stop Funding Hate and Reliable Media met for the first time, face to face, to discuss key principles and priorities for the campaigns going forward. Two of the board members were originally members of the Stop Funding Hate steering group established in 2021, and both played key roles in supporting the organisation through the transition period- including responding to media attacks and political targeting of Stop Funding Hate.
As the organisation has grown, we have also begun putting in place the policies and structures needed to support a more formal staffing model. In July 2025, the board approved a budget, salary structure and employment contracts, enabling two core team members to move from freelance contractor arrangements to employed roles in August 2025. A benchmarking exercise was carried out to ensure that pay levels were fair and appropriate, and legal indemnity insurance was secured to protect the organisation and its staff.
Alongside these operational developments, we have established an anti-oppression working group to ensure that our governance, staffing and campaign practices are fully aligned with our values, address the need for greater diversity within our decision-making structures, and tackle barriers to participation in our work. This reflects a commitment made during the transition process and is informed by conversations with other organisations whose approaches to lived experience governance has provided a useful model for how we might develop our own advisory structures in the future.
We have also invested in legal preparedness, commissioning training on media law to help the team navigate the legal risks associated with our campaigning work. This has provided practical guidance on how to strengthen our communications while minimising legal exposure an increasingly important consideration given the media attacks and trolling campaigns we have faced this year.