No, the Media Isn’t Responsible for Jason Arday’s Suicide

No true culture warrior worth his salt admits to reading The New York Times. Very Online conservatives refuse to read it because they think it hates Jews. Very Online progressives refuse to read it because they think it hates trans people. So intense is their loathing, it seems, that some of these hashtaggers cannot even tolerate the company of those who do read the Times. This includes one @claireyfaerie, who recently told Bluesky followers: “My parents have a [New York Times] subscription. Whenever I go to visit them and see the paper sitting on their coffee table, I remember the trans kids who have died after being denied necessary medical care and segregated from their peers. Remember the trans kids I know. I never stay long anymore. Can’t do it.”

I have my own issues with the Times, which, back in 2021, did more than any other media outlet to spread fake news about those non-existent child graves in Kamloops, British Columbia. But on most days, the Times remains a great newspaper. Case in point: this outstanding 15 August investigative piece about disgraced Cambridge University sociologist Jason Arday, who committed suicide last week following revelations that his academic work was heavily plagiarised and his CV was a tapestry of self-aggrandising lies.

During late July and early August, news outlets on both sides of the Atlantic lit up their hit counters with fresh disclosures about the bizarre claims that Arday had peddled over the years. He said that he’d been prophetically anointed as a social-justice Spartacus by a wise old villager during a trip to South America that never happened. He claimed that he’d been in a (non-existent) coma for weeks when he was a child, and that doctors had urged his parents to pull the (non-existent) plug before his miraculous recovery. He claimed that a racist (and completely imaginary) would-be killer wearing a mask had stalked him in Cambridge’s academic halls, and that other racists had sent (equally non-existent) pig heads to his house. These lies were so grotesque that even left-wing media outlets that (by sheer force of habit) had originally seemed receptive to Arday’s claims of a vast racist conspiracy pivoted to an attitude of pointed scepticism.

While liars and con artists are a dime a dozen, they usually find their marks among lonely widows and art-world dilettantes. Arday’s example was astonishing because the people he dazzled (or who pretended to be dazzled, at any rate) included the brain trust at Cambridge University—which is to say, some of the (supposedly) smartest people on the face of the planet. Their gullibility (or cynicism) has always been the real story here. And it is on this score that the aforementioned New York Times story—bylined with no fewer than five names—breaks fresh ground.