“It’s always been fashionable amongst those who don’t like a message to blame the messenger,” wrote Tory ex-immigration minister Kevin Foster on the GB News website in December. He was responding to a report from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) which laid bare the state of Islamophobia on the channel, which concluded: “GB News hates Islam and Muslims.”

For Foster, GB News is the “whistleblower trying to raise the alarm, simply because what they have to say is an uncomfortable truth”. Some “think any challenge to their views must be a sign of innate bias, a voice to be silenced and ignored,” he waffled. “One day all media outlets will be grateful for the free speech GB News is defending.”

In a planet-sized irony, GB News was very upset about Novara Media exercising its free speech. After we ran an opinion piece about the CfMM report which claims that GB News has an “unhealthy obsession” with Muslims, the plutocrat-backed news channel sent us a threatening email from its legal counsel. The email listed three alleged “errors” it claimed were made by CfMM, which it said showed that its report was “inaccurate and misleading”.

Of the three “errors”, the first was not an error at all, while the second had already been amended in the CfMM’s report. In the third, GB News’s lawyers pointed out an apparent mistake in a passage about presenter Patrick Christys calling Muslims a “Trojan horse”, which incorrectly cited a segment in which he had actually been talking about Iranian sleeper cells. This would have been a bigger deal if not for the fact that elsewhere he had indeed said “hardline Muslims” are a Trojan horse, talking darkly of “some elements of the Muslim community in Britain”.

Certainly, these apparent errors did not change the basic fact that GB News had repeatedly carried shocking Islamophobic statements on its channel. In any case, none of them made their way into Novara Media’s write up.

While laughable, the email to Novara Media from GB News contained an unfunny whiff of censorship. It liberally deployed legalese in the manner of rich companies throwing their toys out of the pram and trying to suppress criticism without a leg to stand on. It baselessly claimed our article was “defamatory” and not “responsible journalism” – as if GB News is in any place to lecture anybody about that.

GB News presenters’ coverage of the CfMM report has been brittle, angry and dismissive. Christys raged that the report was a “smear”. Tragic comedian Mark Dolan used the fact that Mastermind presenter Clive Myrie shared the report on social media as an excuse to run a hit piece on him. Michelle Dewberry ran a segment in which she misrepresented her own words about the riots and smeared Novara Media’s journalism.

She said: “That article, again, it repeats claims that I described rioters as ‘white working class normal Brits’ basically, again completely overlooking the fact that no, I did not. I clearly distinguished between rioters and people that were ordinary working class Brits taking to the streets of Britain.”

This is a self-serving and misleading interpretation of her original statement. As horrifying race-riots gripped the country, she stirred the pot by complaining that people are “furious” and feel that there is “a two-tier approach” to law-and-order. She talked of “white working class” Britons who had “the audacity to take to the streets about something they’re passionate about” while being recklessly unclear about who precisely she meant. It follows therefore that she misled the audience about Novara Media’s article, which correctly reported that she had also condemned rioting.

The email to Novara Media from GB News’s lawyers ended on a slightly menacing note: “Now that you are on formal notice of these concerns, we expect you to take them into account and to amend your article – including its headline – accordingly.” We responded asking them how precisely they would like us to amend our article, since we hadn’t made any of the alleged errors they listed in their email. They have not replied.

It’s worth pointing out that Novara Media can only stand up to these bullies thanks to the help of our supporters – a small but growing army of people giving on average £8 to support our independent journalism. They pay for the hours it takes to research, edit and meticulously check the claims in our articles and, if it comes to it, they pay for the sage advice of our expert legal advisor.

By contrast, GB News, which claims to be the “People’s Channel” and runs pronouncements about free speech, can pay lawyers to send vexatious emails because it is bankrolled – in the face of massive financial losses – by reactionary multimillionaire Sir Paul Marshall.

Far from free-speech defenders, GB News wants to be able to broadcast a narrow range of reckless, inflammatory statements and then blame the messenger when they get criticised for it.