When coverage stops being scrutiny and starts being a hunt

Jason Arday resigned amid plagiarism claims. Then the media kept coming. A week later, he was found dead – and the press has serious questions to answer.

According to the codes of practice of press regulators IPSO and IMPRESS, journalists must not engage in intimidation, persistent pursuing or harassment. After weeks of intense coverage of a man most people had never previously heard of, Jason Arday is dead. The Metropolitan Police say his death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious; no cause has yet been confirmed.

The allegations of plagiarism have not been definitively proven one way or another, although Liverpool John Moore's have said that they have cleared his PhD thesis of any suspicion of this. What began as a Substack post from Nathan Cofnas, a researcher known for his anti-DEI views, was followed by separate analyses from the Times and Telegraph, and a wider investigation by the Guardian into inconsistencies in Arday’s account of his life. Cambridge opened its own inquiry. Arday admitted errors in his doctoral work, while disputing that he had lied.

None of that is in serious dispute. The question is what happened next.

These papers and outlets will argue there was genuine public interest in the story of a leading academic whose credentials and back story didn’t hold up. Fair enough, up to a point. But what was the public interest in continuing to pursue him for more than a week after he had already resigned his position?

As the writer and activist Owen Jones put it: “Cabinet ministers embroiled in scandal receive less media attention.” Quite.

I don’t know Jason Arday, have never met the guy, and know nothing about him beyond what I’ve read, seen and heard in the media. People I do know and whose opinions I value say he was a lovely bloke who always had time for his students, and who often went the extra mile for friends and colleagues.

The number of published articles about Jason Arday after he had resigned.

None of that stopped the coverage. I don’t always agree with the London mayor Sadiq Khan, but his description of what Arday faced was hard to argue with: an “unacceptable public hounding and campaign of abuse … pernicious public shaming that other people in his position wouldn’t have faced.”

Arday himself, in an interview with the Times before his death, called the campaign against him “racially motivated” and a “well-orchestrated and co-ordinated” attempt to unseat him. He’s not the only one to say so.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge academic who remained in touch with Arday until the day he died, said he had been subjected to “relentless scrutiny, including ridicule, discrediting absolutely every detail of his life.” Arday, he said, wasn’t coping with the loss of his career and reputation – and felt he couldn’t go on.

The campaign group Hacked Off, which pushes for tighter regulation of the press, called for an inquiry into the conduct of the British media following Arday’s death, saying the scrutiny he faced “went far beyond any limited public interest considerations around academic standards.”

Arday’s death should be a wake-up call for the media industry. It’s almost as if Leveson – the judicial inquiry into press conduct that followed the phone-hacking scandal – never happened. Journalists who kept pursuing him after his resignation need to take a long, hard look at how they covered this story and why they didn’t stop. As things have turned out, it looks like they have taken part in nothing less than a lynching.

As the Scottish rapper and social commentator Darren McGarvey put it: “When people who’ve overcome adversity become publicly prominent through telling their story then they also become vulnerable . . . when visibility spikes with no safeguard in place, people’s lives get messy”. The pile-on, across social media and the press, made Arday’s final week unbearable.

That’s not just a tragedy. It’s a scandal that needs investigating.

Jason Arday: Demand a public inquiry now.