Was the Jason Arday Coverage Unreasonable?

Jason Arday, for those unfamiliar, was a highly ranked sociologist at Cambridge, often proudly cited as an amazing example of success of the underprivileged—both because he was the youngest black professor at Cambridge and because of his supposedly amazing life story. His story contained a number of incredible elements, including that he first spoke when he was 11, that he was illiterate until the age of 18, that he played semi-professional soccer, and he made considerable money playing snooker.

It turned out, as uncovered by Nathan Cofnas, that Arday was a serial plagiarist. A lot of his work had been copied from others. A lot of his life story was likely totally fabricated. And his work didn’t seem up to the kinds of academic standards one would expect from a professor at Cambridge. After quite extensive media coverage of his plagiarism, scholarly errors, and fabrication, Arday was found dead—likely from suicide.

Undeniably, this is a tragic situation. Arday, whatever you think of him, should be alive. It is tragic whenever anybody dies. When a public campaign drives a man to the point of likely suicide, we should all mourn. I found some of the right-wing cackling in response to his death pretty ghoulish.

The reaction from many left-wingers to Arday’s death was vindication. Many people felt like his death indicated that the pile-on had been unreasonable and excessive. Ibram X. Kendi claims “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.” Karen Attiah comments on “What Jason Arday’s death by media mob says about the old machinery of anti-Black terror in the algorithmic age.” Kate Manne suggests “Gossipy Academics Helped Kill Jason Arday.”

So was the press coverage unfair or excessive?

Before we answer this question, one preliminary note: we should not judge the behavior of those who criticized Arday differently because he died. One’s culpability for behavior depends on what was known at the time the behavior was taken. Unpredictable things happening later don’t affect culpability. It is also very bad to whitewash and venerate people’s bad behaviors after they commit suicide, as one of the beliefs that often drives people to commit suicide is that it will be the ultimate way of showing up all those who persecuted them in life. This is one reason the show 13 Reasons Why may have led to an increase in suicide rates.

Nonetheless, I think there is a case that the wall-to-wall media coverage of Arday’s misconduct was excessive. I don’t agree with this argument, but it’s at least worth considering. The basic argument for its being excessive is the standard argument against giant internet pile-ons. Even if people do bad things, they do not deserve to have the whole internet turned against them. It’s bad when random people who cheated on their spouses become the internet’s main character and are judged by tens of millions of people.

What Arday did is less bad than, say, domestic violence—but I would be opposed to random perpetrators of domestic violence being made into a sensational national story. So if you agree that those who commit ordinary crimes shouldn’t be subject to this kind of media feeding frenzy, one could argue on similar grounds that you should oppose the coverage of Arday.

Now, one objection you might have at this point: maybe there is no in-principle problem with excessively covering bad actions of individuals. Maybe, if the entire internet covered some moderately serious crime, that wouldn’t be unjust. The problem with woke cancel mobs, on this view, is that they targeted behavior that wasn’t actually bad. But if behavior is bad, then perhaps public shaming is appropriate.

I find this pretty implausible. Seems obvious to me that the internet weighing in on random acts of misconduct isn’t the right way to adjudicate these things. One reason is that the internet often lacks key details, jumps to implausible conclusions based on weak evidence, and subjects people to punishment that isn’t proportional to the seriousness of their offense.

Another reason is that enforcement of norms ought to be regular and consistent, to maintain both fairness and deterrence. To the extent that internet mobs are enforcing justice, this will be justice of the mob not of the law. There is no way to make internet mobs proportionate, fair, or consistent. Arday shouldn’t be punished 100x more severely than other plagiarists.

Here is the reason I don’t think this coverage was excessive: this was a major news story. The important aspect of it wasn’t that Arday plagiarized, but that Cambridge learned about the plagiarism in 2023. They did nothing. This story is debatably an example of DEI-related lowering of standards for minority professors. Just as it is appropriate to cover police killings as a microcosm of broad issues in the criminal justice system, arguably there can be similar reasons to cover this story. Insane misconduct from one of the lead institutions in the world is noteworthy.

Then, when various people uncovered Arday’s plagiarism, he contacted the police. In one of these cases, the police investigated the man for four months. This element of the story is a notable illustration of the totally absurd disregard for free speech in the UK.

The other notable reason this was a story was the totally bonkers reaction from a number of high profile left-wing professors. The Good Law Project, for example, summarized the situation as “Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism.” Their petition on this got signatures from members of Parliament and from the Green party’s leader.

Here is an analogy: imagine that a well-regarded conservative think-tanker was on video harassing a coworker in a way that was exactly as immoral as Arday’s plagiarism and fabrication. This, on its own, would maybe be a minor news story but not a significant one. But now imagine that he contacted the police, who investigated a journalist for four months for uncovering the story. Then, after the video came to light, huge swathes of the conservative establishment rushed to defend him. They claimed that “leftwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of harassment,” and got a petition going in his defense. This was signed by leading members of the UK Reform party.

This would obviously be news. It would be a bit unfair to the guy that his misconduct became a major public news story, just as it was a bit unfair to Arday. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to cover it. Sometimes, stories of individual misconduct really are newsworthy, and in such cases, covering them isn’t unreasonable. The difference between Arday and standard cases of massive internet mobs condemning people is that Arday’s conduct really warranted major news coverage.

We should hold in our heads two conflicting thoughts. First, the coverage really was unfair to Arday. It’s unfair for a person to become the laughingstock of the whole internet for doing things that are less bad than various items of less-serious malfeasance. Second, this really was newsworthy. It is sometimes permissible to cover stories even when they’re a bit unfair to someone. It is reasonable to cover cases of ambiguous but justified police shootings, even though they’re unfair to the perpetrators.

Now, one final point is that obviously many of the people now most loudly criticizing the coverage are total hypocrites on the topic. Had a right-wing public figure seriously plagiarized, many of these people would have joined massive internet pile-ons. They certainly wouldn’t have condemned the pile-on. (Ask: how many of these people are on the record as having opposed any left-wing pile-on ever?) Many of the same people complaining about the coverage of Arday have mocked the deaths of right-wing figures.

Overall, I think that some of the internet reaction was a bit excessive. Arday was not really a public figure in any major sense. Scorn and mockery directed at a private citizen by tens of millions of people for misconduct that, while real, is far less serious than lots of common misconduct carried out by lots of people is wildly disproportionate. But while the Arday situation was extremely tragic, it doesn’t seem like covering it was unreasonable. This really was a newsworthy situation, and sometimes uncovering the truth burns those who behaved badly.