It’s always easy to blame the media but that is not where the fault lies

Amidst all the allegations about a plagiarised PhD and the apparently fantastical claims in his autobiography, one article which stood out to me was by an anonymised student of his at the University of Roehampton, London, in The Times, which claimed his teaching was poor and his reaction to queries about marking aggressive and defensive.

Fair or not, as a now retired university lecturer I could understand the irritation of someone given 70 for an essay asking why they didn’t get 75, as this student described, but the description of his response was not of someone confident in what they were doing.

It’s hard to imagine how it must feel to be lauded one minute and derided the next, having every aspect of your past publicly dissected, your reputation crumbling with every spin of the news cycle. And as the controversy about his appointment grew, his friends pointed out the much higher risk such attention posed to the mental health of an autistic person like him.

It is unquestionably a tragic story which has been appropriated by all sides of the diversity debate to shore up the beliefs of extremists, be they racist bigots or the kind of guilt-ridden white liberals who put him at high risk of exposure in the first place, but I can’t better the brilliant Trevor Phillips, the former Equality and Human Rights Commission chairman who argued that the failure of those who appointed him at Cambridge, and before that Glasgow, to apply their critical faculties has set back the case for more diversity and inclusion.

At the Edinburgh Book Festival this week, Zimbabwe-born Oxford professor, Simukai Chigudu, a qualified medical doctor from Newcastle University before he moved into academia, briefly spoke about how difficult the previous fortnight had been for black academics. Perhaps tellingly, he did not go into details, but it’s obvious that grossly unfair inferences will be drawn by some that black academics’ positions owe more to their skin colour than ability.

Against the background of an autistic black man hauled down from a pedestal to his death amidst relentless publicity, it was inevitable that anger would turn on the media for publishing the stories which wrecked his reputation, with Lord Simon Woolley describing it as a “public assassination”, and journalist Carole Cadwalladr calling it a “digital lynching”, an appalling reference to racist murder in America.

Campaigning lawyer Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project demanded to know what risk assessments were carried out by the media, and called for a public inquiry to ensure a “responsible press." He was backed by Labour MPs but the Greens went further in pressing for an inquiry into the “culture and behaviour” of the press, and that the media should be “sorted out”.

The Hacked Off campaign issued a statement which described a “campaign of harassment which went far beyond any limited public interest considerations” and that “relentless intrusion …was conducted without any regard for his welfare.”

Other than expressions of sympathy for Professor Arday and his family, the UK government has not responded specifically to the demands, although meetings between Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Hacked Off have hinted at a willingness to act on calls for tighter press control, and the coverage surrounding Jason Arday’s death might provide the justification.

The outrage about the coverage centres on three things − race, the vulnerability of people with mental health issues and the proportionality of the reporting – but the principles of freedom of expression and the freedom of the press appear to be secondary considerations.

Introducing a requirement to take someone’s mental health into consideration before publication, as some have suggested, would require knowledge of private information, and if it emerged subsequently could curtail justifiable investigation. When one in a hundred people in the UK are currently diagnosed with autism, and a significant proportion of criminals have mental health issues, the result would be an avalanche of spurious complaints.

And when there is widespread interest in a breaking story, how can any single organisation decide what is a proportionate collective response? A similar issue was raised in the inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing and when multiple organisations are involved, a solution was not forthcoming apart from desist requests through the regulator, which only members of the mainstream media will heed.

Professor Arday’s friends insist the coverage should have stopped when he resigned, but that didn’t mean the institutions who thrust him into the limelight did not still have questions to answer, and indeed the internal investigations are proceeding. And his publishers were still selling his autobiography.

Whether it was the quiet August “silly season” for news or not, all the “whitabootery” comparisons with other allegations of academic plagiarism which did not make the news do not mean the rise and fall of Jason Arday was not a story. There were, after all, no demands for press control when The Observer revealed that Raynor Winn’s 2018 memoir The Salt Path was largely a work of fiction, wrecking the author’s reputation and creating a controversy which is still in the news this week.

It’s always easy to blame the media, but nothing suggests the fault lay anywhere other than with those who ignored a vulnerable young man’s shortcomings and put him in a position where disaster was inevitable. And the only way lessons can be learnt is if we can read about them.