Why do they want you to be angry?

We may never know whether Jason Arday was guilty of the things he was accused of.

Not one of the claims made in the media frenzy that led up to, and followed, his death has been proved or disproved. Except the one that began it all. He was cleared of plagiarism by Liverpool John Moores University, who awarded his doctorate. But the media scrutiny didn’t stop. In fact, it intensified, with a flood of accusations about his personal life, claims that he had lied about his experiences and achievements. Claims that have not been substantiated.

People have been quick to take sides, to either justify the scrutiny on a man branded a liar and a fantasist, or to defend a man trying to make change in the face of systemic racism and ableism.

But retreating into our ideological trenches to shout at each other is only compounding the issue at the heart of all of this.

We need to stop and ask why Arday was the focus of so much scrutiny.

I mean, look, we know why. On the surface, at least.

Jason Arday was the youngest ever Black professor at Cambridge. And only the sixth Black professor in the university’s long history. The man who made the initial allegations of plagiarism that started this whole witch hunt was a white supremacist, Nathan Cofnas, who was dismissed from Cambridge for stating publicly that Black people were intellectually inferior and that they didn’t have the true capabilities to hold senior positions in any areas except entertainment and sport. So, he clearly had no agenda whatsoever, then…

But the media didn’t stop to question that agenda. Or, if they did, they didn’t care.

And this is the real point. It’s not just that Arday was treated differently because he was Black. And autistic, which the far right also hate. It’s that media organisations weaponised that racism and ableism and worked hard to make sure we were all angry about these unproven allegations.

I’ve seen some truly hideous pieces from journalists trying to justify all this. “Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy, but you can’t criticise the media for asking legitimate questions.” Sure, and people falling off cliffs is a tragedy, but you can’t criticise people for shoving them… Oh, wait, you can, because that’s murder.

These journalists either chose to hound Arday because they supported the racist (and ableist) ideology, or they didn’t realise (or chose not to notice) that they were being asked to cover this story over all others because of the ideology at play. They claim it was in the public interest because Arday was a public figure (which is a stretch—few people had heard of him outside academic circles until this “story” broke). But they sidestep questions about why this accusation of plagiarism was more important. Arday lost his job over allegations that he was cleared of. Many white professors have kept their jobs after being found guilty of plagiarism.

But I don’t want to go into the double standards, because plenty of people have covered those already. My interest is bigger than that—why are we talking about academic plagiarism at all?

The job of the mainstream media is to protect the mainstream. To an extent, I think it always has been, although they used to at least pretend to look critically at the world.

The old adage goes:

“If one person tells you it’s raining, and another tells you it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to go outside and find out which one is telling the truth.”

That used to be the foundation of journalism. Writers would have to verify a story and check the validity of claims before they printed a word. Today, no one seems to care about the truth. They print whatever people say, and then haughtily tell you they can’t be criticised for the consequences.

What changed?

Media outlets became owned by decreasing numbers of increasingly rich men. And, because those men are very rich, they wanted to protect their money, so they became increasingly involved in politics. So now they have a vested interest in who is in charge. However much individual journalists at the bottom of the ladder want to report fairly and accurately, their bosses have other ideas. They have an agenda, and they use the newspapers and TV channels at their disposal to implement it. If a journalist wants to keep their job, they’d better follow the party line.

The media has an immense amount of power. They tell us what to focus on. They decide what we should know about, and what we should remain ignorant of. So we don’t hear about the white professor who kept his job, but we do have 249 articles in 22 days about the Black professor who was exonerated.

The Times newspaper in the UK was still running paid ads promoting the poisonous articles about Arday after he had died.

The media seemed almost desperate to keep this story in front of us, to make us angry about these allegations. We have to ask ourselves why this mattered to them so much.

The answer is, if we were all looking at Jason Arday, if we were all wasting our anger and energy getting in a flap about what he may or may not have embellished about his life, then we weren’t paying attention to more important matters. Like, whether the President of the United States of America might have raped young children. Or whether Nigel Farage was guilty of financial misconduct. Or the fact that Farage definitely did breach the MP’s Code of Conduct 17 times, as the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards ruled in January.

How about the fact that water companies are poisoning our rivers and oceans? How about the mistreatment of tech corporation employees, or the silencing of their whistleblowers? How about the damage to the planet being done by AI data centres, and the extensive plagiarism of writers’ works and destruction of books that the programmers of these tools are committing? I thought we cared about plagiarism so much we needed to write about it more than 11 times a day?!

Stories of serious misconduct by powerful people either don’t get covered, or they get briefly mentioned and then buried again. Because the media doesn’t want you focusing on how broken our system is. Then you might try to change it.

If enough of us were angry about the things that are truly wrong with our system, instead of being whipped into a froth of outrage over whether someone fibbed about how far they ran once, then our society would topple. We’d bring down patriarchy and capitalism, and the billionaires would be in trouble. So they keep us distracted. Be angry about that uppity Black man, don’t look over here at what we’re doing with all your money…

We’ll probably never know whether Jason Arday lied or not. He might have embellished some areas of his life, or he might have been telling the truth all along. The journalists “investigating” weren’t able to prove he was guilty, but they ran the story anyway. His publisher apparently didn’t bother to fact-check his memoir (where have we seen that before…? Anyone read The Salt Path or A Million Little Pieces? I have many thoughts on the publishing industry and their complete lack of interest in safeguarding…), and if they had they would either have pulled it (if he had lied) and prevented him from ever being put in this position, or had all the proof ready at their fingertips with which to defend him (if he hadn’t lied).

I’m sure Jason Arday wasn’t a saint. None of us are perfect, and I don’t think it does any good to suddenly start waxing lyrical about the pure virtue of a man that most of us didn’t know all that much about. I don’t know if he told some fibs. But I’m also not sure I care. We’ve all done some not great things in our time, and I’m sure if the media poked its nose into any of our lives they would be able to find some things (or some accusations of things) that we would find devastating to have made public. At the end of the day, maybe he told some lies. Maybe he didn’t. He was an imperfect human, like anyone else. But he never hurt anyone. He never damaged anyone’s life. If he had, you’d better believe we’d have heard about it by now.

What Jason Arday was accused of was so minor and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We were told to feel so very angry about it, but I’m struggling to see why we should care. We’re told to be furious when anyone in the public eye is less than perfect, especially if that person is from an underrepresented background. Those of us who have minoritised identities know that pressure to be exceptional just to justify our existence. But no one is perfect. We want our own flaws to be accepted and forgiven, but we’re unwilling to show a sliver of compassion for the people held up to public scrutiny.

Jason Arday wasn’t a saint. He was just a human. His transgressions, if they even happened, were so minor. The trouble is, they were alleged to have taken place while he was having the audacity to be Black and autistic and successful. He was a beacon of hope for other Black and autistic people. The people who control the media didn’t like that. They didn’t want other Black or autistic (or, god forbid, both) people getting the idea that they too could be successful. That they could take up space in society. That they could exist freely.

Jason Arday was hounded to set an example. To make other Black and autistic people afraid to be visible, to make a noise. To tell other white people that it is ok to scrutinise and accuse and put down Black people who get ideas “above their station”. To make it clear that Black and autistic people are not welcome in positions of power.

And, at the same time, he was an easy target for distraction. The media knew it would be easy to brand him as evil because people are already primed to see Black men as the enemy and autistic people as untrustworthy. They knew they could use him as a focus for our outrage without putting effort into annoying things like proof, thereby keeping that outrage away from anything that might impact their interests.

Next time a media frenzy like this starts up, I beg you to stop and ask questions.

• Why this person?

• Who stands to gain from me being angry about this?

• What might I be being distracted from?

• Do I really care about this issue? Are there other issues that are more important to me?

• Where do I want to direct my energy?

Maybe the story that’s running will matter to you. Maybe you’ll decide that your anger about this situation is entirely appropriate. That’s fine. At least you’ll have decided that for yourself, rather than just following the media’s orders.

Because that’s what happened to Jason Arday. We were pointed at him and told to hate him. And we all obeyed so completely that he lost his life.

Social media and blogging sites like this should give us power. We can hold powerful people accountable by giving our views on what’s going on in the world. We can come together and share outrage, coordinate action. But at the moment, we’re allowing that power to be taken over. We’re letting billionaire-controlled media outlets tell us what to think, what to be angry about. We let ourselves be distracted by media pile-ons, to be brought into the pile-ons, instead of taking control of our own voices.

What would happen if we refused to be told what to think? What would happen if we simply didn’t engage with these pile-ons, and kept talking about the things that mattered to us? What would happen if we held the people with actual power to account? What if we were angry about the real harm being done in the world? What if we refused to be quiet about that? What if we refused to be distracted?

Then real change might come. The media is scared of that. Make them afraid—reclaim your attention.