At this point I'm genuinely surprised the argument over Jason Arday is still going, but it is. The latest angle, which both David and I wrote about yesterday, is that the media were to blame for his apparent suicide because they...did their jobs?
It could not be more clear that the problem, as they see it, is not that the media revealed a fabulist who was unfit for his high-profile job. The real problem is that he was one of them and the media aren't supposed to go this hard against one of them. The media ought to know that it's okay to destroy a fraud and liar on the right but when it comes to their side of the aisle, the media is supposed to dial it back. The failure to dial it back for Jason Arday is being treated as a sign of bad (racist) motives.
And that's how you get opinion pieces like this one from the Guardian arguing that the right is a bunch of monsters even though in this case they were clearly right about Jason Arday.
His family – in a moving statement remembering an “amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son” – has said he was “subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him”. This we know. The right and far-right desire to identify and then defenestrate anyone or anything that could be seen as symbolic of progress is virtually pathological. The rightwing media, in a quiet summer – a quarry identified – led a charge that meant Prof Arday’s face was disobligingly displayed on almost every front page, every TV screen, for weeks. His family, who knew him best, are clear about what that ultimately meant for a man who was neurodivergent and by the end – according to reports – desolate. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”
To sum it up, the evil, racist right hounded the poor man to his grave. Now the awkward truth: They were right about him being a fraud.
The right in its hostile, partisan pursuit nevertheless uncovered doubts about the professor’s academic work – accusations of plagiarism – that could not be satisfactorily dismissed. The professor himself made public claims about his life and achievements that could not be verified. Of course that was a good thing for those who, for racist and political reasons, sought to denigrate him...
The monsters were right and their glee at being right was terrible to behold. And while it's good to demonize those foes of all that is good (the right), don't lump them in with the reporters who were saying exactly the same thing because, well, because the media is composed of fair-minded progressives.
Amid the pain and understandable rage in recent days, there has been invective levelled at the right, but also a deal of social-media abuse levelled at progressive journalists – notably black journalists, and especially Guardian journalists who interrogated and reported on the claims made about and by the professor. There have been attempts to load them with at least partial responsibility for his death. Suggestions that, with their actions, they have betrayed their heritage: that they personally should be for ever haunted by his fate. One can try to be understanding and frame this as part of the outpouring of grief, but that makes those attacks no less corrosive, no less hurtful to the journalists themselves.
Hate the right all you want for uncovering this academic fraud, but don't hate the left-wing journalists for doing exactly the same a year later or a month later. It's totally different, you see. They held no ill will toward the fraudster.
...if it appears that a prominent figure – be they black or white – is being less than honest in ways that meet the test of public interest, those black journalists have a right, indeed a duty, to interrogate that. I know well some of those who did so in the case of Prof Arday, carefully and professionally, and are now, amid the anger, confusion and rage, being abused and castigated for it. They were not responsible for what Lord Chris Smith, the Cambridge University chancellor, called the “racist feeding frenzy”.
This is so vague that I honestly have no idea what the author is talking about, but the thing being dubbed a "racist feeding frenzy" was just people on the right saying what was obviously true while people on the left kept pretending it wasn't because Arday was black. And that's its own kind of racism.
The underlying idea here, which I think is common on the left, is that the right should always be discounted because of their bad motives. Meanwhile, progressive journalists should always be credited for their virtuous motives even if they are repeating things the conservatives said first. Put another way, no conservative author can ever be credited for just speaking the truth and no left-wing journalist can be faulted for failing to do so until absolute forced by circumstances.
It really is maddening over time to be part of this never ending game of media Calvinball. Sure, the right said Joe Biden was slipping for years, but even when it turns out they were absolutely right almost no one will admit that or remember it for next time. No one wants to talk about why the rest of the media dropped the ball either. And no matter how many cycles of this game we go through, right up to Jason Arday, the Left never can credit the right for just speaking the truth.
Needless to say, this is not a healthy media landscape. It's a recipe for failure that always harms one side more than another. And that's exactly the point. If they can't have resistance journalism that demonizes the right and favors the left, many people would rather have no journalism at all.
If you think I'm overstating that, watch this clip.
As part of an ongoing self-imposed struggle session, a professional journalist criticizes Novara Media for digging into Jason Arday's academic credentials. I'd love @malonebarry and others in this camp to more clearly lay out what they think journalists *should* do. https://t.co/Jw6iidEEsq
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) August 19, 2026
Update: Another hot take suggesting the Guardian in particular should have just shut up and maybe never covered this at all.
The Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham insists that only the right-wing media ever should have covered the Jason Arday story, because he insists it was only ever a culture-war story. This despite the fact that Times Higher Education, a nonpartisan outlet, was the first to spend…
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) August 19, 2026
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