Nigel Farage has built his career on one trick: convincing people he’s the outsider raging against the establishment. Yet no politician in modern British history has been given such an easy ride by that very establishment – above all, the mainstream media.
Reform UK is treated less like a political party and more like a phenomenon that must be covered because it makes for good television. This distortion has handed Farage and his outfit vastly more attention than they deserve, while letting them dodge most forms of serious scrutiny.
Broadcasters are supposed to play by one basic rule: balance. Political parties should be covered proportionally, reflecting their actual importance in Parliament. But when it comes to Reform, that principle has been tossed aside.
Reform has six MPs at time of writing. The Liberal Democrats have 72. Yet Reform enjoys blanket coverage while the Lib Dems, Greens, and even the SNP barely get a look-in. Why? Because Farage makes the right kind of “noise”. Producers know that he’ll stir outrage, delivering clips of bite sized bombast that can be shared on social media millions of times – so he gets booked more than almost any other politician inside or outside government.
The Farage obsession and blatant bias
One of the clearest examples of this media love-in is BBC Question Time. Farage has appeared 38 times in the programme from 2010 to 2024. It is frankly staggering that one man, whose party is still a parliamentary footnote, is treated as a permanent fixture on Britain’s premier political show. It isn’t balance, it’s obsession.
As if the overexposure isn’t bad enough, many media outlets also seem to cover him with an incredibly selective degree of scrutiny. On the one hand, they are quite happy to hound someone like Angela Rayner, for months on end, over a mistake in her tax arrangements; culminating in front pages, rolling coverage, and the – ultimately successful – demand for her resignation.
Now compare that with Farage. He claimed his house in Clacton was bought by his partner, so he could avoid paying stamp duty. This can be interpretated as a naked attempt to bend the rules, yet there has been far less media outrage.
Then there’s his GB News pay packet. It was recently revealed that the channel pays him somewhere in the region of £100,000 a month. This is on top of his MP’s salary, and earnings from personalised videos he sells on Cameo – he’s an extremely wealthy man. But he chooses to funnel his GB News earnings into a private company, specifically to minimise his tax contributions. Again, this arrangement has been met with relative media silence. If a Labour MP tried the same, they’d be on every front page for weeks, and if they held a ministerial position, they’d most likely be forced to resign.
Less press scrutiny of Farage and Reform
Beyond his own financial affairs, the Farage media shield miraculously seems to apply to the Reform party as a whole. Reform has a serious problem with its representatives: since May 2025, 17 councillors have resigned up and down the country, some because they were ineligible to serve, others because they simply couldn’t do the job, and a few for far worse reasons. If Labour councillors dropped out at this rate, the media would be running “chaos in Labour” headlines daily. But when it’s Reform, there’s barely a mention – the circus must roll on.
But, arguably, the most dangerous indulgence is not the lack of scrutiny over Reform’s people or finances, but the failure to interrogate their claims.
Take Farage’s now infamous promise to “stop the small boats in two weeks.” He repeated it during the election campaign and in broadcast interviews, and it was largely allowed to pass without challenge. Not only would this proposal contravene international law, but it is also impossible on a practical level due to the sheer complexity of the asylum processing system. Instead of pressing him for detail, many interviewers chuckled along or simply moved on. The claim was treated as colourful rhetoric, when it was in fact an outrageous falsehood.
Fuzzy and incoherent strategies go unchallenged – falsehoods tolerated
Then there are his vague, undercooked ideas for the NHS. Farage has railed against health service “waste” for years, but his actual plans – reducing NHS reliance on overseas staff, expanding private provision – would worsen waiting times and deepen health inequalities. Yet those proposals are almost never professionally examined by journalists who would usually comb through a manifesto with a magnifying glass. Instead, he is allowed to posture as the tribune of the working man, while advocating policies that would gut the institutions ordinary people rely on most.
He also allows his party to amplify bizarre and, in some cases, harmful conspiracy theories, spouted by the hangers-on who cling to his tweed coat tails. The doctor who gave a speech at the recent Reform conference is just one such example. While his utterances may appear almost outlandishly ridiculous – suggesting Covid was a hoax and even claiming the Royal Family’s cancer diagnoses were somehow suspicious – the press should have torn into them, and no doubt would have if they had been delivered at any other party conference. But it has become increasingly clear that, in the media’s eyes, Reform is only to be taken seriously when it suits, and treated as unserious when it doesn’t, granting them a free pass either way.
This indulgence is reckless
If Labour or the Conservatives gave oxygen to such conspiracies, the media would be merciless. When Farage and friends do it, it is filed under “colour” – part of the spectacle. But there is nothing harmless about mainstreaming conspiracy theories: it corrodes trust and can seriously endanger public health – just look at the US where measles cases have reached a 30-year high thanks, in no small part, to the appointment of a famous vaccine-skeptic as Secretary for Health.
It is worth noting that, in much of the press, there has always been a double standard, with right-of-centre governments traditionally receiving an easier ride. Indeed, Conservatives, in very recent history, were forgiven for a string of offences that would end careers not just in the Labour party, but in almost any other sector of society. To name just a few: Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, and Liz Truss all broke the Ministerial Code, but managed to cling to office regardless.
The Farage ‘mirage’
But Farage is truly in a category of his own, treated less as a politician accountable to the public, and more as some kind of political rockstar. When he speaks, it’s packaged as ‘entertainment’. When he cheats, it’s shrugged off as “just Farage being Farage”.
This is not harmless; it is a distortion of democracy by endlessly platforming Farage and granting him spectacle status. The press has manufactured legitimacy for a man and a party that has done almost nothing to earn it.
Voters are told, over and over again, that Reform matters; that they’re the insurgent force reshaping politics, and that they deserve as much, if not more, attention than parties with well researched policy platforms and positions.
As a result, Farage and Reform thrives.
In the public interest; the media needs to demand accountability
It’s long past time that the media stopped giving Farage a free pass. Reform should be treated like any other party. Six MPs are not deserving of wall-to-wall coverage, and their finances, councillors, and conduct should be scrutinised with the same ferocity as Labour’s. Their policies should be tested against reality, not waved through as punchlines. And their leader should be recognised for what he is: a seasoned operator, with an establishment background, who has played the press for decades.
The tragedy is that Farage doesn’t need to be particularly strategic anymore – the media is doing all the hard work for him. Until that changes, our politics will remain warped; establishment media must recognise their outsized role in setting the political agenda, and this begins with rolling back the easy ride for Britain’s biggest political pretender.
More on news.
