Photography Team Member and Staff Writer Anaïs Bonhomme discusses how the media’s initial coverage of allegations against late academic Jason Arday quickly spiralled into a wider inquisition, and the lessons to be learnt for journalists.
Speaking to The Times in an article published on July 31st, Jason Arday revealed that the intense public scrutiny surrounding his academic achievements was “soul-destroying”, adding, “I don’t think people realise that there’s a human being at the end of this”. A mere two weeks later, Arday was found dead at his Battersea residence. This fervent backlash raises an increasingly important concern: when does journalistic reporting on outrage become participation in it?
From Investigation to Outrage
Just three years after making headlines for becoming Cambridge University’s youngest black professor, Jason Arday became the subject of allegations of plagiarism within his academic publications. These accusations were brought to public attention primarily by American researcher Nathan Cofnas, who previously stated in a Substack post that in a meritocracy, black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.
Soon, additional reports began to examine further apparent inconsistencies in Arday’s research, including what a Times analysis described as the use of ‘impossible’ data. Other outlets speculated about the reliability of his previous autobiographical claims. Arday’s professional and personal life was thus thrust into the media spotlight, prompting some on social media to brand it as a modern-day ‘witch hunt’.
That characterisation becomes hard to debunk when confronted with the sheer volume of online coverage that this story has generated – much of which bears little relation to what first brought Arday into the headlines. On 6 August, The Times published an analysis investigating whether AI had been used in his resignation statement, as well as a critical review of his upcoming “mawkish” and “self-aggrandising” memoir. Four days later, the newspaper published another article detailing an account from one of Arday’s former students, framing his teaching as “[spouting] nonsense”.
Writing for the Daily Mail on 7 August, Jan Moir shows just how far the story has snowballed into a far more overtly political debate. She describes Arday as the “Milli Vanilli of the academic world”, dismisses his resignation statement as “simpering”, and most strikingly, compares his rise as an academic to the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old white student who was fatally attacked in Southampton last December. Writing that “the minority are always the victims and therefore must take priority”, Moir treats the two cases as consequences of a “woke ideology”, pulling Arday into a debate about race, institutional bias and political correctness. In short, sections of mainstream media have swiftly helped turn Arday’s story into a vehicle for a culture war.
The Weight of Cumulative Coverage
It should go without saying that journalists have every right to investigate powerful institutions and individuals, and hold them to account whenever wrongdoing is suspected. The press has the rare ability to shape public opinion, and in the attention economy of online journalism, there is evidently an incentive among journalists to keep a major story going. After all, in this frenetic environment, online anger is valuable. The more Arday was scrutinised, the more material there was to report. The more that was reported, the more attention the story received. An event that generates outrage also generates attention, and attention creates pressure to keep that story alive.
But where is the limit? It’s a given that journalists cannot control how a reader reacts to a story or predict the response of the person in the spotlight, but this does not absolve them of any accountability. They can determine whether continuing to cover an individual like Arday is truly in the public interest, or if they are keeping him within the news cycle simply because the public has demonstrated a temporary, insatiable appetite for stories about them.
The Problem With ‘Just Doing My Job’
In an online age where stories spread like wildfire, it’s increasingly important for journalists to step back and consider what they report, as well as the possible consequences of how they choose to frame it. In Sarah Ditum’s article ‘Was it wrong to write so much about Jason Arday?’ published three days after his death and eleven days after her scathing review of his memoir, she asks, “Should I, for example, have not reviewed his book? Should I have silenced my doubts about his medical history? I would have been failing to do the basics of my job in either case.”
Of course, journalists shouldn’t feel as though they must suppress information simply because it may offend or distress the subject of a story. They should not, however, treat journalistic accountability as though it exists only at an individual level. There are valid grounds for writing a critical review, investigating one’s professional history, or questioning the claims made in one’s work; such investigation should be encouraged. But when we ignore the cumulative effect of hundreds of articles and continue to add fuel to the fire, some accompanied by cutting language that fuels vitriolic online debate, they feed an escalating wave of public condemnation centred on the same individual.
Who Gets the Spotlight?
Several Cambridge University professors have resigned in recent years following other allegations of misconduct, yet their cases received far less sustained press coverage than Arday’s. Professor Simon Goldhill, who resigned in June following an external investigation into complaints of sexual misconduct, received comparatively limited coverage in The Times, and his name is notably absent from its headlines.
Similarly, Professor Peter Hutchinson was acquitted of indecent assault following a trial in 2006. Years later, students made complaints of sexual harassment against him, which led to restrictions on his teaching and contact with students. Following additional controversy over his emeritus status and readmission to college events, Hutchinson resigned in 2019, after over 1300 students and alumni signed an open letter protesting the decision to allow him to retain his position. Nonetheless, Hutchinson’s case also seems to have attracted less media attention than Arday’s.
For comparison, one investigation found that across 14 outlets over 22 days, 229 articles covering Jason Arday were published, including 188 in the days between his resignation and his death. It’s here that we witness the cycle of outrage in full force, as Jason Arday was transformed from the subject of a news story into a media figure in his own right. His name, having become synonymous with controversy, meant that virtually any revelation about him could be presented as newsworthy or in the public interest, simply because it was about him. The name ‘Jason Arday’ had become the story.
All this, then, raises an uncomfortable question for us as journalists – do we have blood on our hands? This is not to suggest Arday’s death can be attributed to the press, but neither can journalism pretend that its role ends when an article is published. Observing the coverage develop into something that resembled a witch hunt has made one thing glaringly clear: in the pursuit of keeping the public appetite satisfied, journalism risks forgetting that there is a limit to how much of a person can be picked apart and consumed.
For more Comments and Feature pieces click here.
About the author
