London (AFP) – The British press is once again in the spotlight for its methods, this time over accusations that its full-throttle coverage of plagiarism allegations against the Cambridge academic Jason Arday led to his untimely death. Arday, who was appointed in a blaze of publicity in 2023 as the youngest-ever black professor to Cambridge University, was found dead on Friday, aged 41, after weeks of excoriating media reports. He quit on August 5, writing in his resignation letter that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”. His family, friends, and supporters have denounced a “sustained campaign of abuse” that one Cambridge professor called a “racist feeding frenzy”.
Banners reading “249 articles in 22 days” were brandished at a Monday vigil in central London attended by thousands of people, in which speaker after speaker attacked the media’s role in the scandal. “I believe the vicious media campaign drove him to his death,” MP Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to the UK parliament, told the vigil. “One of the really big stories of this has been the press hounding of Jason, and how it went from being an investigation to being something quite malicious and quite personal,” Michael Bankole, a politics lecturer at King’s College London, told AFP. “People close to Jason prior to his death had warned that the scale of the coverage and the tone…was taking its toll on Jason,” he said.
In an article in the right-wing Times daily headlined “Was it wrong to write so much about Jason Arday?” journalist Sarah Ditum defended her reporting. She said she did not regret her coverage as she would have been “failing to do the basics of my job” if she had not investigated the claims against him.
Some reports focused on the strangest claims by Arday of his personal achievements, including that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, some partly with a fracture in his leg. “Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press,” Ditum wrote on Monday, setting out a long list of ways in which Arday was failed by academia and his publishers, saying they did not fact-check his claims. “He was a star…He had chosen the spotlight,” Ditum argued, acknowledging that his story had the “misfortune” to break in the middle of a summer news vacuum.
The tabloid Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine blamed social media for amplifying the story. “What began as legitimate journalistic inquiry into certain serious allegations grew into an internet pile-on,” she wrote. And it had inevitably attracted “the attention of people who are genuinely racist, and that is wholly unacceptable”. The left-wing Guardian, which also conducted lengthy investigations into Arday, said in an editorial it “sought to establish what was true. That is the proper function of journalism”. For over a year Guardian reporters “worked extensively to verify what (Arday) had told them. In many instances they could not”. “It is wrong that the journalists who did their job responsibly are now being subjected to an onslaught of abuse.”
The UK media has long been criticised for being too intrusive, and moves have been made to curtail some of its worse excesses while balancing the need for press freedoms. Prince Harry — who blames the press for the death of his mother Princess Diana, killed in a Paris car chase with paparazzi — recently lost a case before a UK court alleging illegal information gathering about his personal life years ago. Media watchdog IPSO, which operates a 24-hour emergency harassment helpline, said it was reviewing a flood “of complaints” about the coverage of Arday. If any breaches of the Editor’s Code of Practice were found it would take “appropriate steps”, it added. It recalled that the code contains “specific protections relating to privacy, harassment” including “cases involving personal grief and shock”.
Media law expert Mark Stephens told AFP it was “perfectly legitimate” for the media to investigate the allegations. “The problem is that they were warned that he was suicidal and didn’t stop…(and) if anything escalated the reporting,” he said. He added that once Arday had resigned, “What’s the public interest in continuing to berate him?” And he maintained that media lawyers were “less and less…looking at the consequences and editorial or ethics judgments”. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has called for “reflection” to determine what happened.
But more than 111,000 people had by Wednesday signed a petition by the Good Law Project, an activist group, calling for a public inquiry to “ensure a responsible press”. “Instead of getting better, press conduct is getting worse. And the impact of that failure is deadly,” it said.
© 2024 AFP
