The Jason Arday Reckoning

The attempts to cover up the complicity of the UK media’s role in his death may be its sickest move yet

I haven’t been able to shake the Jason Arday story since writing about it on Monday. The news that after weeks of being unrelentingly hounded in the press, an autistic, black, working class Cambridge professor had been found dead.

And yesterday, after a week of dwelling on it, I had a moving conversation with one of Jason Arday’s childhood friends. In the hundreds of articles before his death and after, no-one had reported on the kind, gentle, extraordinary man he and his friends knew. I’m not going to go into that here or what he has to say about his close-up view of his friend’s treatment by the press. I’ll do more on that in next few days.

I wrote this newsletter before that conversation and although he fleshes out so much more of what’s here, I thought it was worth putting it out first. Thank you, as ever, for reading.

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Jason Arday wasn’t the first person to have been hounded by the UK press and he won’t be last.

We know that more certainly than ever by the response since his death from large parts of the British media class. I’ve been gobsmacked by the lack of humanity, by the knee-jerk defensiveness, by the silence from the senior leaders of these organisations. Are we just going to cover this up and move on? Really?

Have you noticed that it’s already fallen off the news cycle? Is that because it’s not newsworthy? If so, why is it still trending day after day on social media?

If a kettle had the same safety rating as the British press, it would be banned from sale. It’s not just a potential death trap. It is a death trap. That’s what this story tells us.

But what we’re still failing to acknowledge is the extent to which Jason Arday already knew that. He knew exactly how black academics are targeted, he not only understood it to be a “playbook”, he’d contributed to the literature on it. It was the same bad-faith process that had seen Claudine Gay, the first black woman to be president of Harvard, forced from her position. But she was not a one-off example and when Arday was asked to deliver a prestigious keynote lecture, it’s what he picked as his topic, titling it “Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook”.

That lecture title and topic is right there in the introduction of the Guardian article that marked an important turning point in the story. The day of its publication, August 5, marked the moment the story left the right-wing echo chamber, which Arday could rationalise and dismiss, and species-jumped into the wider media.

It was no longer a right-wing racially motivated witch-hunt. It was now a free-for-all, and this exposé that went beyond the claims of plagiarism to interrogate details about his personal life marked the moment.

Arday’s friend Kehinde Andrews said that he’d asked Arday at the beginning how long he thought the media attacks would last and he’d said two days, three days max. It was already seven days in when this was published, one day after his friend, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, a world-leading autism expert, said that he considered him a suicide risk.

It’s the final sentence that’s unbearable. Arday had an internal roadmap of where this led. He knew the stakes, the toll, the fall-out and the possible pathways.

I wrote a story, years ago, about a cluster of teen suicides in Bridgend, Wales, and in the process learned a lot about suicide contagion that’s never left me. It’s a powerful, poorly understood transmissible condition that collapses both time and space. It transmits down generations and across continents. It’s an idea, a permission, an almost algorithmic-like pathway. Jason Arday’s brain had already trod that path. It was a fact in the literature that he’d cited and footnoted. He’d already mapped the exit route that others in his position have taken.

This entire story is about shame. And maybe where you stand in your understanding of it is where you stand with your own relationship with it, with what is the most human emotion of all. Because we were all bystanders in the shaming of Jason Arday. We all witnessed in real time as he was ridiculed, mocked and undermined by an overwhelmingly white, middle-class academic and media establishment, many of whom come from generations of privately-educated privilege. Here was a black working class professor whose early life had been shaped by academic underachievement and cognitive disabilities being told, repeatedly, overwhelmingly, with no pushback from any quarter, that he wasn’t academically and intellectually good enough.

In the last few days, so much new information has finally come to light, including this which I posted on BlueSky yesterday morning, by Professor Jason Stanley. He points out that academia has easily quantifiable metrics that he said no journalist had apparently checked.

Stanley pointed out if a journalist had checked those metrics and then compared them against other scholars in the field, they would have reached this conclusion.

The unassailable fact that Jason Arday was cleared of plagiarism by Liverpool John Moores, the university that awarded him his PhD, is even now, almost entirely absent from the reporting. But then that’s because journalists haven’t bothered to find out what academic plagiarism actually is, in Stanley’s view:

Maybe he wasn’t such a dummy after all? He wasn’t “found guilty of plagiarism” as I read in one piece yesterday. And even some of the most sympathetic coverage is still calling him a “fabulist”, a “fantasist”, a “fraud”. Because that’s what the “responsible” “public interest” reporting told us. Yesterday’s leader in the Economist, the leading article in one of Britain’s most prestigious outlets, continued to mock the claims about Arday’s marathon running which it claimed he did on a “broken leg”.

Why would an outlet of this calibre and resource fail to fact check even the basics of this claim? The Guardian quote is with regards to a different claim, about the smear campaign and Arday never said he’d said he’d broken his leg. He said he’d kept running on a hairline fracture. And guess what? Long before he was famous, dead, an academic, accused of plagiarism, Cambridge’s youngest black professor, he was just a local lad inspired to raise money for others, as an entire list of local newspapers reported at the time, and yet, until this week, were cited nowhere.

Middle East Eye has tracked them all down here. But why on earth did no-one do so before?

It’s the punching down that’s got me. The bullying. That hasn’t let up since his death.

There are, of course, many thoughtful, intelligent, ethical journalists in Britain. But many are employed in news organisations that participated in the feeding frenzy, that failed in ways small or large. They are not free to speak out. And we’re all guilty anyway. I consumed the Jason Arday coverage even as recoiled at it. But what I didn’t realise, until late, was how suspect, how inadequate, how lacking the underlying reporting was. Commentators were feasting on partial, inaccurate, incomplete material.

And missing, from it all, of course, was Jason Arday. A day or two ago, I spoke to Hannah, my ex-partner’s daughter, who had been affected by the videos she’d seen in her timeline of a gentle, smiling, beautiful man “who seemed almost too pure”.

I was trying to explain to her why I was still so caught up in the story and she thought about it and said: “It reminds me of when I went to meet Alice Ruggles’ parents.” Hannah had a stalker in her 20s and two years ago, we made a BBC podcast where we’d tracked down the man behind it. Alice Ruggles was a girl who’d been in her class at school, who’d also had a stalker. In both of their cases, the police had failed them as they dealt with a terrifying situation outside their control. Hannah survived. Alice didn’t. She was murdered by her stalker. The episode in which Hannah goes to talk to her parents is profoundly sad and moving. You can listen to it here.

The visit to the parents had given her a shivering insight into where this could have led. And maybe, that’s what this story is for me. If I’d lost my defamation case, I would have been Jason Ardayed, I knew that. Just as, she could have been Alice Ruggled. We’d both survived but it wasn’t a given.

And Hannah had been through the painful experience of reckoning with how her stalker had preyed on her, the private anxieties that he’d exploited and the shame she’d carried from that and locked away for years. And that’s what Jason Arday faced too. A careful, skilled manipulative bully who knew exactly where to hit. That’s what Nathan Cofnas, a white supremacist who set the story in motion, did. This piece in Byline Times lays out the race science network of which Cofnas is part and which their previous reporting had showed has made significant inroads at Cambridge University, a subject unreported elsewhere.

We know now how carefully planned this was. But there was so much in the public domain. Professor Jason Stanley was calling out Cofnas’s eugenicist beliefs back in 2020 long before he got the Cambridge gig.

But the point I’m getting to is that the most hideous judgment of all is not delivered by your enemies, it comes from within: it finds a mark somewhere deep inside you, where it collides with the most damaging judgments you hold of yourself on your worst days. That’s what shame is.

Maybe it’s why I feel this story on a different vibration to some of my peers. As a middle-aged woman without the comfort and societal respectability of a nuclear family, I had different anxieties to Jason that were exploited and weaponised but no less painful.

I’ve had heat from calling Jason’s experience a digital lynching but I know of what I speak.

To be clear, social media abuse is downstream from press coverage. It’s not separate and distinct. All media is social media now. And it’s not just why this is a story that’s gotten so under my skin, Hannah points out. It’s also the involvement of the Guardian. Its leadership has issued what amounts to a cease-and-desist letter of anyone questioning anything about its decisions and is now gaslighting Jason Arday’s family and friends and anyone with a pulse who witnessed this entire episode in real time.

Its silence and defensiveness is also exposing its reporters to harm, in my view. They’re the ones with their names on the stories even though they have no power or control whatsoever over when or what is published. It’s editors who make these decisions collectively. These stories went through many hands and the young black and brown reporters whose names are on them are not culpable for any unintended consequences and I really hope that they know that.

I especially hope that the necessary safeguards to protect them are finally in place inside the organisation. This was from just last year:

All news organisations - and universities for that matter - need a Chief Safety Officer. A senior executive who is also an expert in the hybrid threat landscape that journalists and academics navigate. Someone within the institution with the expertise to understand the complexity of the information landscape and the bad actors within it, and how disproportionately black and brown people, women and minorities are at risk.

They would ask the same questions about the people its journalists report on too and they’d understand the news reports don’t exist in a vacuum. Mainstream media and social media are indivisible now, there’s no Chinese Wall. A Chief Safety Officer would have sufficient power and authority to step in when, as I wrote in the last newsletter, a world-leading expert in autism, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, has publicly stated that the autistic man they are reporting on is, in his view, a suicide risk. Because at no point was Jason’s neurodivergence, his autism, taken into account by, it seems, anyone at all though, as the writer, Will Self, who has two autistic children points out in a furious screed:

In 2019, I proposed the above to the Guardian’s senior management. It was my version of a desperate cry for help. I’d just disguised as a dry, quite academic memo. It was never acknowledged, let alone acted on but at some point afterwards I was invited for lunch with my editor, a kind, humane, overworked man with no financial budget and limited power within the wider organisation to help me in any meaningful way.

As we were leaving, he told me about a threatening phone call he’d received. Someone critical of the paper’s trans coverage had called his home phone and threatened his wife. The paper had made major mistakes in its coverage of the subject, as he’d be the first to admit, and he was unprepared for the ferocity of the backlash. “That’s awful,” I said. “I actually thought of you,” he said. “I thought it was probably a good thing that I got to experience a tiny taste of what you’ve been through.”

I so appreciated those words and they’ve stayed with me. If I had a magic wand I’d want all journalists to take a walk inside the Jason Arday Hate Machine in which I’d use AI to harvest their personal data, identify their inner weaknesses, and then blast personalised posts, articles, videos and tweets at them without respite. In this version, I’d have LLMs create stories that “ask questions” about their school records and their teenage sporting achievements. And I’d want them to remain in there, trapped, with no way out, for weeks, if not months. Though, as George Orwell knew, even two minutes of hate will do.

The lesson of the Arday scandal is that this could have been any of us, could still be any of us.

I mentioned my friend, Jess Search, last week. And I want to share her advice again, here, because maybe it will help someone in some way at some point when they need it most. But as we stood outside the court room on the first morning of my trial, I mentioned the shaming and humiliation that I felt so acutely was coming my way.

“Nobody can make you feel shame,” she said. “It’s what sexual survivors are told.” It comes from within and it’s up to you to decide whether you can and will be shamed. It’s what I would have told Jason Arday. It’s what Gisele Pelicot told the world, that shame has to change sides. Her resilience was truly extraordinary. But it’s a semi-magical quality that some people have and some people don’t and perhaps those who struggle most of all are people whose brains are built differently, like Jason’s.

But shame has to change sides. It’s the media’s turn now. We cannot allow the witch hunt to turn on others and that includes young journalists of colour. But we, the British media should be shamed. Need to be shamed. How else do we prevent the next death?

I feel ashamed. Don’t you? This was a collective failure born of the collective shortcomings of our industry that’s a foundation of our collective information space and what we’re witnessing in part is a collective refusal to acknowledge that it’s been re-shaped by the Silicon Valley-owned platforms that create the incentives that unleashed a click-driven cruel and animalistic bloodlust from the most primitive areas of our brains.

It didn’t just overwhelm Arday, but us too. Our frontal lobes, where we do our most complex reasoning, were hijacked. We lost our moral selves. This should be a moment of reckoning for the entire UK media industry and pretending otherwise is to gaslight his family, friends, the public and the very memory of Jason Arday himself.

Some people have suggested this is the press’s “Milly Dowler moment”, the day the nation recoiled in disgust when it discovered a murdered schoolgirl’s phone had been hacked and sparked a public inquiry. But she was already dead. This is so much worse. Jason Arday was alive. And maybe he still would be. If it wasn’t for us.