He is too generous to the press, because there're lots more instances where they failed. And the Guardian, after a good article on Arday, went back to their usual grievance-mongering trash.
Besides silly season, probably the reason why the mainstream press were more fair here was that Arday was outright lying and plagiarising and could be shown to, and they are nominally still committed to pursuing truth. Whereas when it comes to fuzzier claims about "white supremacy", the standard left wing line cannot so easily be clearly falsified.
I'm sure the fact that Arday himself tried to suppress journalism about him using the police and lawyers can't have endeared him to many in the press either.
Why Arday Splits Anglosphere Elites
"The Jason Arday story continues to surprise. I didn’t believe that there would still be much to talk about regarding this man’s individual story nearly a week after his death, even though I thought it was clear that his rise and fall exposed deep problems in academia. Instead, the reaction of the British left to the entire episode has been clarifying, and helps explain how we got a figure like Jason Arday in the first place.
What is interesting here is the split between different factions of what gets lumped together as the “liberal establishment” by conservatives. Some of the most devastating reporting against Jason Arday came not from Nathan Cofnas or others on the right, but pillars of the mainstream media in the US and the UK, namely The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. The first of these found people who knew Arday as a child and contradicted his story about being non-verbal until eleven. The Atlantic harshly reviewed Arday’s memoir before it was released, tried to get his publisher to explain its fact-checking process, and even found his book proposal, which included additional lies that didn’t make it into the finished work like that he had testicular cancer and had spent several months in a coma. The New York Times published Jesse Singal on the Arday fiasco, and gave this brutally frank assessment of the man and his career in what was a news article, not an opinion piece, after his death...
As someone of the position that the media is honest and good, all of this was encouraging to see. The only acceptable view on Arday is that he was a fraud, and that his career exposes how low academia has fallen due to declining standards and a commitment to DEI. Who exposed him, their motivations, Nathan Cofnas’ views on how many black scholars would be at Harvard without DEI, etc., are simply not relevant. In general, this is how the prestige media has approached the story. The worst reactions from the prestige press that I’ve seen have not denied that Arday was a liar and in the wrong but simply denounced the feeding frenzy as racially motivated and going too far. See these pieces in the Financial Times and The New Yorker. It’s not exactly wrong that many conservatives were eager to take down a black scholar, but this was based on an accurate belief that Arday got where he was precisely because he was black.
I wish we could leave the story there. And indeed, I thought that the pro-DEI crowd would, being unable to defend Arday, try to forget that he ever existed. They wouldn’t necessarily admit that he had proved something was deeply rotten in academia, but surely they wouldn’t want to keep the focus on a story that makes a mockery of everything they believe in?
Maybe that’s what would have happened had Arday not killed himself. But his death seems to have energized the British left and brought out its authoritarian impulses. There are broadly two camps here. The first is actually pretending that Arday was right and his critics were wrong. Byline Times is an independent British outlet whose motto is “What the Papers Don’t Say.” Earlier this week, it published a bizarre article about how a “Peter Thiel-linked race science network” made its way into Cambridge and was responsible for the downfall of Arday. They helpfully included this picture showing the masterminds of this network.
The piece describes Cofnas as an “anti-black racist” as if that’s his official title, noting that “many of these articles did not acknowledge that the central accusations were being made by a man who believes that inherited racial differences make black people less intelligent and would leave black people absent from virtually every elite position in public life outside of sport and entertainment.” Of course they didn’t mention that, because real journalistic outlets understand that whether an accusation is true or not doesn’t depend on its source.
Byline Times goes on to dismiss the plagiarism charges against Arday, and characterizes his claim about running 30 marathons in 35 days as supported by contemporaneous records – which only came from sources reporting what Arday himself said. The article continues in this vein, finding some post hoc rationalizations for some of Arday’s lies and exaggerations, while ignoring the ones that no one can plausibly defend.
Others on the British left aren’t trying to defend Arday on the merits, but are angry at the media for focusing too much on the man and his story. Unlike their American counterparts, British leftists have accompanied this with calls for the press to be regulated so something like this doesn’t happen again. Dozens of parliamentarians signed a letter demanding an investigation into the media over the Arday story, noting over 200 articles written about him before his death, which one signatory described as “reach[ing] way beyond what could be reasonably considered in the public interest,” as if this is a matter for the government to decide.
The Good Law Project has another open letter, signed by over 100,000 people, including members of Parliament, declaring that “self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed” and calling for “an immediate public inquiry into how to ensure a responsible press given its contribution to Dr Arday’s tragic death.” For his part, Andy Burnham has reportedly not ruled this out, but for now doesn’t show signs of being inclined to immediately give the activists what they want.
The most amusing proposal is a petition with 6,000 signatories advocating for “Arday’s law,” which would limit the number of articles that can be published about a person within a timeframe. I like to imagine Putin suing British newspapers for spending too much time covering the war in Ukraine. After they’ve used their Putin quota for the month, he can launch a nuclear weapon safe in the knowledge that no one will be allowed to know that he was responsible.
This entire episode highlights how left-leaning elites are not monolithic. Despite its problems, the mainstream press overall does a good job when it focuses on a story. It checks its facts. When actors are accused of lying, it will see whether the accusations are true. It is able to separate the merits of a claim from its source. And perhaps its most underrated virtue is that it is capable of shame.
This is not true for the British left, including much of academia. They have their narrative about right-wing racists, fascists, and oligarchs, and facts are not going to get in the way. If things look bad for Arday, you adjust the standards for assessing evidence, and change the subject to the motivations and behavior of his critics.
In terms of identity, the most prestigious journalistic outlets tend to have standards, which means that they select people who first and foremost see themselves as reporters, with whatever political commitments they have being secondary. When they behave ideologically and act contrary to their ideals, the rest of us can critique them on this and there is often a correction, as has happened on the trans issue.
We can distinguish the far left from the mainstream establishment by saying that it puts political activism first. Such people now select into more fringe news organizations like Byline Times, which thinks that The Guardian is too far right, or into the less rigorous fields of academia. From the perspective of a MAGA, these are all the “left” and it’s not much worth distinguishing them from one another, but the divide between the two camps represents the line between civilization and barbarism, and honestly between a camp that you can try to persuade and one that you need to find a way to destroy.
From the American perspective, it’s striking to see how many in the UK go straight to demanding regulation in response to media coverage they don’t like. This is a cultural difference, proving that the First Amendment is not simply a legal principle, but something that creates and reflects a distinctive attitude toward speech...
A lot of the pathologies of the current American right are rooted in the personality of Trump himself – whose very existence mobilizes the chuds and gives them power within their coalition – while the British left appears to be more organically hostile to principles like fairness and a concern for truth...
Iif you add up all the Ardays and Arday enablers in the world, you get something that is often at least in the same neighborhood of being as threatening to liberal institutions as right-wing fascism, and almost certainly more so in a place like the UK"
