One of the values of a historical perspective is that much of the noise disappears. This principle operates over years and decades, but it can also operate over days and weeks. Jason Arday died on the 14th of August, less than 4 weeks ago. With politics and football both back, you might have expected the media circus to have moved on, and British journalists have certainly made the effort to tempt us with new outrages, from Harry and Meghan to dodgy donations. But it's also clear that anger at Arday's treatment by the media has not subsided (the fact that Caroline Flack's name has resurfaced in the discourse tells you there is a deep undertow here), hence the ongoing interest in Nathan Cofnas getting his just desserts and the persistence of columnists attempting to justify their (or their colleagues') treatment of Arday. Examples of the latter include Sarah Ditum's piece for the right-leaning Free Press, in which she attributed the prominence of the story to the summer lull ("As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about"); and Helen Lewis's article in the Nation in which she described Arday as a "fabulist". This term has proved popular with journalists, which is ironic coming from people for whom exaggeration and outright invention is less an occupational hazard than standard operating practice.
According to Lewis, "The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate." This is correct in identifying the disproportion of the media coverage, which can't be excused as a product of the "silly season", as Ditum does, but Lewis is guilty of a misdirection here. She concedes that he "was subject to extra scrutiny because of his race", and admits that "the media coverage of Arday was harsh and high-volume." But she also claims that this "volume came from competing outlets breaking fresh news, as more and more of Arday’s extraordinary claims crumbled under scrutiny." In short, it was unfair, but he was asking for it. But what exactly was Arday's offence in the eyes of the media, as opposed to in the eyes of the academic community, who remain largely sympathetic to a colleague, or in the eyes of Nathan Cofnas and other "race realists", who remain unsympathetic as a matter of principle.
The use of the word fabulist offers a clue. The classic examples of this type in literature - Walter Mitty and Billy Liar - are comic characters with whom we sympathise. But clearly the type being identified here is a more serious case: someone who has materially gained through deliberate deceit and the manipulation of others. The literary template is more a mountebank like Augustus Melmotte, in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, or even Tom Ripley. The emphasis placed by Lewis on the quote from Arday that "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me", which appeared in Lanre Bakare's Guardian takedown on the 1st of August, is telling. The real charge then is one of imposture. In this narrative, Arday didn't deserve his position, which he secured through a combination of cheating and exaggeration, Cambridge's lack of due diligence, and a general desire to promote diversity that has had the effect of undermining academic integrity (the irony is that Bakare's piece had to be amended multiple times due to errors of fact.) This line allows Lewis and other jounalists to swerve the accusation of racial prejudice by emphasising that the affair is about academic standards and the corrosive nature of plagiarism.
The problem is that academics themselves have suggested that the general concern with plagiarism is overblown, and that's before you get to the specific examples attributed to Arday. Unsurprisingly, Lewis does not hesitate to attack them for this: "The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal." She criticises Professor Jason Stanley, who wrote a throughtful blog explaining why journalists hadn't even done decent journalism by checking Arday's citations, and Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, who is a bete noire of the media due to his involvement in cases against newspapers. More generally she dimisses Arday's supporters as "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Lewis is delegitimising them, dismissing them as people with an unhelpful agenda or simply unserious and easily-led. It is, of course, her habitual critique of the left.
Though race was obviously a major factor in the wider media's pursuit of Arday, for the liberal media the issue was class. This much became evident in the aftermath of his death. The Guardian's considered assessment sought to divide the sheep and goats in its headline: "A rightwing witch-hunt focused on Jason Arday – but so did legitimate journalism". In the article, Hugh Muir emphasised the distinction: "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, but wasn’t that also a legitimate concern for those who bore him no ill will – indeed cheered his ascent – but see the importance of integrity in academia and public life?" The use of "legitmate concern" appears to be wholly unironic.
Tabloid readers are not assumed to be interested in academic plagiarism, but they are interested in the idea that someone may be nicking a living, or that someone is in the wrong social position. The ideological core of tabloidism is the preservation of hierarchies, hence the fawning over royalty, the obsession with fashionability, and the beasting of the socially marginal. Racial hierarchies are important, but they are invariably trumped by class. Arday's problem wasn't that he was a black man in a built-up area but that he didn't look the part of a pillar of the establishment. He wore dreadlocks and casual clothing. You wouldn't mistake him for Trevor Phillips or Trevor McDonald. Had he stayed at Liverpool John Moores University, it's unlikely that the affair would ever have blown up. At worst, Cofnas's allegations would have been taken as evidence that outside the Russell Group standards continue to decline due to the folly of getting more working class kids into higher education.
Though the hounding of Arday was initiated by the Daily Telegraph's attack on him as "Cambridge’s diversity poster boy", the story quickly spread among the other broadsheets, with predictable results. In the Observer, Kenan Malik insisted that Arday's supporters were fuelling the right by taking up the cudgels, a variation on his usual theme that however objectionable the right might be the left has done itself no favours. In The Times, Camilla Long symbolically reclaimed the Cambridge office of the "God-level fabulist and nonsense-monger", while blaming Arday's rise on "privileged, self-hating white people". The Guardian's sanctimonious approach - deploring the racist bigotry while elevating inconsequential plagiarism to a capital crime - was typical of the way that the story fed upon itself. As Will Self noted in a suitably acerbic attack on the media en masse, "evidence that the pursuit is hurting its object itself becomes content, such that his pain becomes another story, and objections to the coverage—no matter from whom—become another controversy."
It is significant that while the British press did what they normally do - crowbarring the story into existing frames about indulged minorities, the decline of academic standards and the corrosive nature of "woke" in universities and cultural production - it was the US press, albeit commissioning British writers like Ditum and Lewis, that emphasised that this was really a story about the media itself. The headline on Ditum's article - "The Press Didn’t Kill Jason Arday" - is a classic of the "my T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt" genre. The headline on Lewis's article - "The Jason Arday Truthers" - was an attempt to construct an opposition in unflattering terms that could be sneered at for its gullibility, in contrast to the ceaseless professional questers for truth in the press corps. Just re-read her description of it: "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Is that a coherent community with shared "truths"? Does it even make sense in its combination of organisations and platforms?
The reason for this transatlantic difference is that the class dimension of the Arday affair has less salience in the US where attacks on Black acdemics have usually targeted middle-class high-achievers whose primary offence is being Black and whose secondary offence is promoting Black Studies. Jason Arday studied race in the context of sociology, but his offence was being appointed as a professor at Cambridge, hence the deflection of blame in Ditum's piece to "The institutional failures that elevated him to Cambridge without vetting his work", which makes it sound like his appointment was almost random, which it clearly was not, as Jason Stanley pointed out at length. At the end of the day, Arday was "not one of us", while the journalists and columnists who hounded him were very much part of the gilded circle of British public life. The regret over Arday's death is synthetic, just as it was over Caroline Flack and other victims of press bullying.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous lines from The Great Gatsby are relevant here: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Journalists are not necessarily rich, but they serve the interests of the rich and consequently tend to adopt the same attitudes, most notably condescension towards the opinions of others (recall Helen Lewis's contempt towards Jeremy Corbyn for lauding the artistic abilities of ordinary people), and a refusal to accept responsibility for their own actions. Journalists and opinion-writers tend to flit from job to job, but for this reason they have a strong professional culture, which is why working for the Guardian doesn't make you a different animal.
This culture has a tendency to move like a herd ("competing outlets breaking fresh news", as Helen Lewis put it). Jason Arday's tragedy did not arise from his personal failings or the administrative shortcomings of Cambridge university but simply because he got caught in the path of the herd. If he was at fault, it was in naive willingness to put himself in the public eye through press interviews about his appointment and back-story and his yet-to-be-published memoir. Once he realised his mistake, it was too late to get out of the path of the herd, and by then the momentum of the herd was too great to arrest the inevitable trampling. Jason Arday wasn't fair game; he was road-kill.
