Thousands DEMAND Media Inquiry After Arday: Government Pushes Press Promotion INSTEAD!

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Right, so around 100,000 people are now calling for a media inquiry into what happened to Jason Arday.

At the same time, Andy Burnham’s Government is considering whether the solution to the internet being a dumping ground for fake news is to give the largest newspaper groups and television news channels special access to the top of your feed, because they are oh so trustworthy. Keir Starmer’s last gasp policy drive as this was of course, but which Burnham has now inherited, seen by them as though the fix for those pesky kids and their independent and alternative media, is to let the mainstream players pile even more of their dross in front of you, the very reason I daresay, so many of you turned to the internet for your news content to begin with.

So on one hand, we have demands for an inquiry into appalling press behaviour being demanded by thousands and on the other, a government-backed round of algorithmic favours for the very press owners who need to answer some serious questions about a witch-hunt about destroying a man’s life, who was not even in the public eye to speak of, that they have passed off as journalism, because it’s anything but journalism. Journalism is about holding power to account; what this was, was a lynching and the so called mainstream press followed one after the other like a bunch of sheep who have discovered a sudden fondness for bloodsports.

The press is being asked to account for itself after 249 articles about a single Black professor, while the Government is weighing whether parts of that very industry should get a boost from online platforms such as YouTube.

Even the best of satirists would look at the timing of this and say nah, this one can’t be played for laughs.

Jason Arday has become the test case this trusted-news plan should frankly get binned off over immediately.

Trusted journalism.

It sounds great, doesn’t it?

Who’s going to object to that?

We all want journalism we can trust don’t we? I would quite like to see more of it myself and for those who trust my content, thank you, I aim to be trustworthy too, but I don’t expect you to do so uncritically either. But saying you want trustworthy journalism is frankly the easy part, isn’t it? The hard part is deciding who deserves such a label. How do you measure trustworthiness, especially after this spectacle over Jason Arday?

Trusted journalism must be protected. Trusted journalism must be prioritised. Trusted journalism must be easier to find.

All right then. Trusted by whom?

On what grounds? And what exactly happens when one of these gold-star publishers decides to turn a vulnerable person into a three-week, all-you-can-eat content buffet? Because that is what happened to Jason Arday isn’t it?

Cambridge had procedures for investigating academic misconduct. Let Cambridge use them. That is what those processes are for. Are they robust enough? Did anyone bother to check or were they too busy climbing on board the free-for-all?

The allegation was that Jason had presented others’ work as his own. Plagiarism. It raised doubts about some of his qualifications and honorary appointments. He denied it, and Cambridge launched an investigation.

But that allegation about academic work did not stay limited to academic matters.

The newspapers started picking apart Jason’s qualifications, previous jobs, books, charity work, marathon running, and details from an earlier book proposal.

They went through everything about the man, searching for more stories.

That is the real issue here.

Not whether journalists were allowed to report the initial allegation. Of course they were.

The real question is how they managed to turn one allegation into 249 articles in 22 days, as if outrage had literally just become a bloodsport. The MPs are all on holiday, we need something and so called silly season became anything but funny as all of these silver spoon journalists suddenly found themselves without their parliamentary scoops and actually had to do some work for once, which evidently was beyond many of them.

This is how the campaign was being described while it was still ongoing. It’s a supporter’s perspective, not an academic verdict, but it shows that people were already alarmed by the direction of the coverage.

And it didn’t stop there.

NewsCord actually counted the coverage, outlet by outlet.

Two hundred and forty-nine articles across 15 national outlets.

The Times and Sunday Times produced 44. The Telegraph produced 43.

Nearly 90 articles from those two groups alone. And then the rest of the list is like a who’s who of no surprises from the establishment and right wing press.

How many major revelations can you possibly extract from a single plagiarism allegation? Spoiler: you’d run out long before article number three, let alone 249.

Was there a mass daily jailbreak of footnotes that I missed or something?

Were subeditors sent out to dig through bins for stray quotation marks?

No. They had a story that was getting attention, so they kept feeding it.

Then Jason resigned from Cambridge on 5 August.

He said he had reached the limit of what anyone should reasonably be expected to endure. He spoke about being carried through some of the darkest moments of his life. He said he needed time to heal and space to begin again.

Short of Jason walking into every newsroom in Britain with a flashing neon sign reading ‘I am not coping with this,’ I’m not sure how much clearer he could have been.

So what did the coverage do?

It increased.

Of those 249 articles, 188 appeared after he resigned.

After he had left his position.

After he had said he had reached his limit.

After he had asked for space.

The press didn’t back off. It pressed harder.

The press didn’t back off. It floored the accelerator and headed straight for the wall, regardless of whether each article contained one technically defensible fact.

Step back and consider the behaviour of the mainstream media here as a whole.

One hundred and eighty-eight articles. Call it what you like, but restraint isn’t even in the same postcode here.

Whatever you want to call that, restraint it certainly is not. Journalism it certainly is not. Where the hell is the public interest in that?

That is Nathan Cofnas. The whole allegation started with Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas calls himself a race realist, which is what you call yourself when the honest label would make your LinkedIn profile light up in the dark.

His own time as a Cambridge research affiliate ended amid accusations of racism after he wrote that Black academics would be “decimated” under what he called a colourblind meritocracy.

Then he targeted Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor.

Responsible and credible editors should have taken that background into account when deciding how to handle his claims, but there seems to be a dramatic shortage of such editors in the mainstream media.

As much as a eugenicist piece of excrement like Cofnas is easily condemned here, he is not the only one responsible either, and the newspapers should not be allowed to dump all the blame on him now that this has become indefensible.

Cofnas had a Substack.

The Times had an editor.

The Telegraph had an editor.

The Mail had an editor.

Every outlet involved made its own choice to publish, follow up, repeat, and expand.

Cofnas lit the match, sure. The newspapers saw an opportunity for a bonfire and spent three weeks happily pouring on petrol and old tyres on it.

And we know the scale was not inevitable because there is a comparison.

William O’Reilly was a white Cambridge professor who was found guilty of plagiarism in 2023.

Found guilty.

Not just accused on Substack. Not waiting for an investigation. Guilty.

The Financial Times reported on it.

O’Reilly kept his job. The rest of the national press did not suddenly develop a burning interest in his childhood, his previous jobs, or whether he had completed every sponsored run exactly as described.

No national feeding frenzy. No 249-article marathon. No three-week deep dive into the man’s sock drawer and childhood diary.

Well why not?

If academic integrity was the only thing at stake, where was the Times production line for O’Reilly? Where were the Telegraph’s 43 articles?

Where were the columnists, the polls, and the amateur psychiatrists?

They simply weren’t there.

NewsCord made another comparison as well.

It counted 119 mentions of Peter Mandelson in the weeks after the Epstein files were released.

Jason Arday received more than double that. Apparently, the British press found a professor’s alleged citation mistakes more than twice as gripping as a cabinet minister’s links to Jeffrey Epstein. Priorities, obviously-who cares about sex trafficking when there’s a footnote scandal to exploit?

Priorities, clearly.

Totally normal news judgment. Move along, nothing to see except the press falling over itself to miss the point.

Nothing to see here.

Now set that alongside the O’Reilly comparison, and you can see why people reached that conclusion can’t you?

That is the part defenders of this coverage need to address.

Why him? Why this much? Why did it escalate after he resigned?

Jason’s family said he had faced a sustained campaign of abuse for more than three years. They said the misinformation campaign became too much for him, and they asked the press to stop the harassment.

And now of course he is dead. May he rest in peace now he can finally get some. As much as it is impossible to declare that the press is responsible for his death, we can’t prove that after all, it is impossible to not postulate the role it likely had in it.

We don’t need to make such a claim to criticise what happened though. Where this is the end of Arday’s story, it should not be the end of the story of the role the media had in this.

The number of articles are real enough aren’t they? Proven.

His resignation statement was just as real.

The family’s appeal was very real.

The fact that coverage intensified after he said he had reached his limit is real and proven.

No exaggeration is needed when all of the behavioural evidence is there in plain sight.

And then the Good Law Project published its account of what happened at the Guardian.

And this part matters specifically, because it involves a warning sent before Jason died, not concern invented afterwards when everyone suddenly remembered how to sound compassionate.

On 31 July, at around nine in the morning, a friend of Jason emailed Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner directly.

The email raised concerns about Jason’s wellbeing.

It also questioned whether Lanre Bakare was the right journalist to write about him, given what Jason had reportedly said about the lack of trust between them.

Viner did not reply personally. Archie Bland, the Guardian’s head of national news, responded on her behalf and dismissed the concerns.

The article was published.

Now, the Guardian disputes the Good Law Project’s version of events.

Fine.

Put the emails before an inquiry then. Put the editorial decisions before an inquiry. Let everyone involved explain what they knew, what they were told, and why they still went ahead. That would be far more useful than the press investigating itself, gazing into its own navel, and declaring everything absolutely wonderful.

Because someone raised the alarm.

They did it in writing.

The warning reached the editor-in-chief’s office.

And the article still went out.

That is not hindsight. That was a decision made with a warning already on the table.

But, there is also one other thing I want to deal with before moving on, because it hasn’t all been the right wing rags and the liberal establishment here.

Novara Media’s coverage has come under heavy criticism, and not all of that criticism is unfair either.

Aaron Bastani has described the framing used on Novara Live as injudicious and unhelpful in the context of the wider deluge of coverage Jason was already facing.

Good. That needs to be owned.

Independent media, such as Novara, does not get a moral exemption because it has the right politics, the right logo or the right audience. If you add to a pile-on, you answer for your part in it. Full stop.

But there is a trick happening now as well.

The social-media pile-on against Novara specifically, has now become so loud that it risks letting the mainstream press duck behind it.

As if one bad call, one bad day by Novara somehow wipes away 249 articles across 15 national outlets, going on for weeks.

As if it makes the Times and Sunday Times’ 44 articles disappear. As if it makes the Telegraph’s 43 disappear. As if it makes 188 articles published after Jason resigned disappear. As if it makes the Guardian’s welfare warning disappear.

It doesn’t.

Bastani says Novara covered the story once on its nightly YouTube show. That one segment can be criticised. It should be criticised.

But one ill-judged segment and an industrial-scale national-media barrage are not the same thing, and treating them as though they are is how the biggest offenders get away with this s**t. They are far, far larger platforms.

The lesson is not, “Novara made a mistake, so forget the rest.”

The lesson is that every outlet has to answer for what it did, in proportion to what it did.

And that is exactly why this Government proposal is so dangerous. A serious test for “trusted news” has to distinguish between a single bad editorial judgement, which is acknowledged and challenged, and a national publishing machine that kept going after the man at its centre said he had reached his limit.

Which brings us back to Andy Burnham and the Government’s trusted-news plan.

The Government’s Watch This Space Green Paper starts with a reasonable complaint.

People are increasingly getting their news online. Platforms reward whatever grabs attention, and attention is not necessarily the same as accuracy.

I won’t disagree with that.

Social media has made fortunes by showing people the thing most likely to make them angry and therefore most likely to click.

But then the Green Paper asks whether trustworthy national and local news should be made more prominent. And this is where the logic stumbles out into traffic and gets hit by a passing bus.

You are worried that online systems reward engagement.

Fair enough.

But the potential winners include an industry that just produced 249 articles about one academic in 22 days and now that man is dead.

What was all that output chasing, if not engagement?

Was article number 243 vital to democracy?

Did article number 247 finally solve the case? Or were they still being churned out because the Government has finally noticed that algorithms reward attention, but somehow missed that big news publishers chase clicks just as eagerly as anyone filming themselves shouting in a car park.

And when you promote one source in a feed, another source inevitably moves down.

There is only so much screen space after all.

So who gets pushed down to make room for these officially trustworthy publishers?

Independent outlets?

Smaller publishers?

People like me?

The trust criteria have not yet been finalised. The consultation for this, is open until one minute before midnight on 31 August. And responding is not difficult. There is an online Government form. You do not have to slog through all 94 pages as if you’re revising for a degree in bureaucracy. Just answer the parts that matter to you. The key ones are Questions 4 to 6: should “trustworthy” news be made more visible, how should that work, should it be permanently switched on, and should users be allowed to turn it off?

My answer is no, not on the Government’s current terms. No fast lane for a masthead hate rag just because it is big, familiar, or already owned by a billionaire. Any publisher seeking preferential reach should face transparent criteria, independent regulation with real authority, proper complaints and corrections processes, and safeguards for vulnerable people. And you should always be able to turn the thing off. Put that in your own words. Use the online form if you can, if this matters to you, if what has happened to Jason Arday has enraged you, because the Department says it helps them analyse responses. If not, email your response to watchthisspace@dcms.gov.uk. Don’t just call Burnham or Starmer a pillock under this video. That won’t do a lot of good. You actually have a say in where this really matters, but only for another 12 days at time of writing. So have your say and put it where they have to count it. Now is exactly the time for people to challenge this.

Not after the system is in place, that is too late, and the Government will be able to stand there pretending nobody could have seen the next Jason Arday, or Milly Dowler, or Caroline Flack, or Hillsborough-the list goes on-coming.

The public response to Jason’s treatment is already significant.

The Good Law Project’s petition for an inquiry passed 96,000 signatures.

Hacked Off called for an inquiry into the British press’s culture and behaviour.

Sadiq Khan called what happened an unacceptable public hounding and campaign of abuse. He said Jason faced treatment that others in his position would not have faced, and for a change I’ll agree with him on something.

Andy Burnham called Jason’s death a tragedy on many levels and said this was not a time for rushing to judgement.

Well, nobody is asking him to jump over the evidence blindfolded.

Have an inquiry. Examine the emails.

Examine the volume.

Examine why a white professor found guilty of plagiarism received a fraction of the attention given to a Black professor facing an allegation of it.

Take all the time needed to establish what happened.

But do not ask the public to avoid rushing to judgement about the press while your Government moves towards a deadline, now with only 12 days left to run, on whether that press should get special treatment online, over smaller, independent outlets who for the vast majority of cases, have not indulged in such harassment.

You cannot be paralysed by caution when accountability is mentioned and suddenly be full of optimism when promotion is suggested.

Now, I have a direct interest in this.

Not a conflict of interest. Standing.

IMPRESS regulates my work. It is the only press regulator approved by the Press Recognition Panel, which is the independent body set up after the Leveson Royal Charter process.

That means IMPRESS is not just a club with a logo. It is checked against standards for independence and public protection. It can investigate complaints, order remedies, and provide arbitration.

IPSO is different. It runs the Editors’ Code, handles complaints, and can require corrections from its member publishers. But it is a self-regulatory body for those publishers – they mark their own homework in other words - and it has openly said it does not plan to seek recognition from the Press Recognition Panel.

The Guardian is not even an IPSO member. It uses its own editorial code, readers’ editor, and review-panel system. Even more insular you can argue.

So this is not a childish argument that one side has rules and the other side has none.

It’s about who is independently recognised, who is answerable to which framework, and whether “trusted” will mean more than just a large outlet marking its own homework.

Because if the Government wants to give publishers greater prominence in our feeds because they meet strict standards, it needs to explain which standards. Who enforces them? Who checks the enforcer? And what happens when a publisher fails those standards?

If I get something wrong, there is a complaints process. If a correction is needed, I have to publish it.

Several of the national titles involved here subscribe to IPSO, which has not sought recognition under that framework. The Guardian does not belong to IPSO and uses its own complaints system.

That is the reality.

A recognised regulatory code binds me.

That same recognised framework does not bind them.

Yet the Government is considering a policy that could promote major publishers as trustworthy while leaving independent regulated publishers behind. And in a ranked feed, that’s what promotion means: someone gets pushed down so the big players can climb even higher. So don’t lecture me about regulation, responsibility, and public trust, then give the biggest publishers a leg up just because they’re already dominating the news agenda. Act as if they are already big, which they are, so make them wear some big boy pants on this.

Trust is supposed to be shown.

It’s not some family heirloom newspapers get to pass down with the printing press and a wink.

Before I finish, I want to return to Jason himself.

It is Jason talking more generally about people finding ways to act together again, it is what he was really about.

That was Jason Arday.

Not an allegation.

Not a headline nickname.

Not just another item in someone’s morning list of news angles.

A father, partner, son, brother, and professor who had publicly said he had reached his limit and needed space to start again.

So yes, please do feel free to tell Burnham to get lost if that helps.

But don’t just tell him under this video, where it can be ignored. Put it into the consultation response, where someone has to count it.

And ask for a few basic safeguards while you’re at it.

No automatic fast lane for the biggest brands. If there is going to be a prominence scheme, smaller independent publishers that meet some actual standards must be able to qualify too, alongside major publishers who set their own standards.

No behind-closed-doors definition of “trustworthy” written by the very newspaper groups hoping to benefit from it. Make the criteria public. Make the decisions appealable. Review them regularly. Take the privilege away when a publisher fails the standards it claimed to meet.

Require real independent accountability, proper correction and complaints systems, transparency over ownership and funding, and real protections when reporting on vulnerable people.

And give users a choice. If you do not want the Government quietly rearranging your news feed in favour of its approved publishers, you should be able to turn that off.

If Labour’s plan cannot withstand those basic tests, then it is not a plan to protect journalism at all.

It is a subsidy of attention for those who already have far too much of it.

Because after 249 articles, with 188 of them published after Jason Arday resigned and said he’d had enough, the British press hasn’t earned a fast lane. It’s earned a long, hard look in the mirror and a very uncomfortable silence.

It has earned yet another inquiry and above all it’s reminded us all as if we needed it to, that it cannot regulate itself.

For more burning issues that Burnham has not yet addressed and really ought to if he wants to be seen as a change from Starmer, check out more on this channel, such as this recommendation here as your suggested next watch.

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