The Guardian and Professor Jason Arday

I’ve been publicly critical of the Guardian’s conduct on this story and so, as neutrally as I can, I want to set out the facts as I know them before making some general points.

I was approached by a Black member of the academic community on 25 July who wanted Good Law Project to host an open letter in support of Professor Arday. Prior to the approach I had not heard of Professor Arday. I imagine the academic thought of me because, some weeks previously, Good Law Project had hosted a letter for Misan Harriman, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the South Bank, who was also facing racialised attacks in the right wing media.

Lanre Bakare, an arts and culture correspondent, had written for the Guardian about the Misan Harriman letter and so I emailed him. Later that evening he replied agreeing to take a look and I sent him a copy of the letter.

At this point in time, the only story published in the mainstream press was the first Telegraph story – “Cambridge’s diversity poster boy in plagiarism row”. It’s worth observing that this story was racist in its very inception, and we did not know that the scale of the coverage was about to explode.

The small group working on the open letter also approached the columnist Jason Okundaye, as well as Guardian editors Richard Adams (Education editor) and Joseph Harker (who forwarded the request to the Guardian’s newsdesk). We didn’t get any substantive response from those journalists – and the news desk told us it was considering the letter but did not give any indication after that.

On 28 July we published our letter. In the meantime, several further pieces about Professor Arday emerged in the rightwing press.

On 30 July, to the group’s surprise, Lanre Bakare sent a “right of reply” email to Professor Arday. We were very worried about this – we anticipated it would reposition the story not simply as a culture war piece driven by the research of a minor racist academic.

I wrote to Lanre to ask him to reconsider running the piece:

“I’ve been made aware of your incoming piece about Prof Arday. I’m sure you will have thought about how damaging it will be to have the Guardian carry a negative piece about him.”

“I just wanted to make you aware – in case you didn’t know – that several of the claims the Telegraph, Times and others have run with the Telegraph has now, I believe, withdrawn and (although I am not as in the weeds on all of it as you are) others seem to me quite vulnerable.

“I know you’ll want to get this right given the very serious consequences indeed of being seen to line up alongside Prof Arday’s other critics.”

In the meantime, Professor Arday had told me that Lanre Bakare was “a journalist that I have not previously seen eye-to-eye with (we do not trust each other).” In response to a question from a member of the group, I said: “So I don’t think there is a legal remedy but you could write to [Guardian Editor] Kath Viner making the point and asking whether it’s consistent with [the Guardian’s] ethics for someone with beef to write the piece.”

I do not have a copy of that email but the author told me that they wrote on 31 July to Kath Viner – at about 9am that day – warning of concerns about Professor Arday’s welfare, as well as asking whether it was appropriate for Lanre Bakare to write the piece given his history with Professor Arday.

Following my email, on 31 July, Lanre and I spoke for about an hour. We agreed before we spoke to keep the contents of the conversation confidential so all I feel able to say is that it was a mutually respectful conversation that covered the terrain of the emails. My position was that I disagreed with, but understood, the Guardian’s decision to carry a piece.

After the conversation I wrote to Professor Arday saying that I thought the piece would be “better than the right to reply email indicated but still difficult.”

On 1 August the Guardian published ‘Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.’

I sought to put a brave face on it but we were all enormously upset by what we anticipated would be the effect of the story on Professor Arday. It repositioned what had hitherto been a culture war attack on a Black Professor as a genuine news story. Professor Arday was devastated by the piece.

I want to emphasise that I did not agree with the Guardian’s decision to carry the story – and I was uncomfortable with the editorial decision to choose Mr Bakare to write it given his history with Professor Arday and the fact that, as arts and culture correspondent, it was not obviously on his beat. However, I also need to say – this is not a story about him – that he wrestled conscientiously with the points we discussed. And after the piece I wrote to him saying “I think that’s pretty fair, in all the circumstances… (Just in case you care.)”

Within the group we were speaking to Professor Arday most days and all extremely concerned about his wellbeing.

The day before the story was published, there had been a powerful public intervention by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University’s Autism Research centre.

He warned in a tweet on X that “1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide” and talked of the “relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man” which “raises safe-guarding issues”. He was also profoundly worried about the effects of the coverage on Professor Arday’s state of mind.

On 5 August Professor Arday resigned.

In his resignation letter Professor Arday said to his supporters “you have carried me through some of the darkest moments of my life”; “I need time to heal” and “space to begin again” and that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.” The Guardian knew what he said because it cut and pasted the entirety of his resignation letter from the Good Law Project website – where Professor Arday had asked for it to be published – to its own.

In addition to my warning to Lanre Bakare, the team member’s warning to Kath Viner, and Professor Baron-Cohen’s public warning – Professor Arday was now saying the same himself.

Professor Arday had not meaningfully been a public figure; he was an academic and I do not believe he was widely known outside the academic sphere. Such legitimate public interest as there was in him personally, and the alleged discrepancies in his CV, ought to have diminished or evaporated on his resignation. This was certainly true in circumstances where the Guardian had been told publicly and privately that he was highly vulnerable.

The Guardian’s actual response was to dramatically increase the intensity of its coverage. After his resignation, and before his tragic death, the Guardian published well over a dozen pieces about Professor Arday, including podcasts which it seems to have pushed on multiple channels.

On 12 August alone, a full week after Professor Arday’s resignation, it published four pieces – listed one after the other at the top of the Guardian’s website.

Some of the pieces the Guardian ran were under the sorts of headlines that you might have one might have expected in Michael Gove’s Spectator: “‘Always cracking jokes’: questions raised over Jason Arday’s claim he was non-verbal as a child”; “Jason Arday’s life may be a warped fantasy. But so is this conversation around DEI”. The Guardian borrowed freely from attack lines carried in the Mail, The Times, the Telegraph and elsewhere.

The comment pieces – by Afua Hirsch, Nesrine Malik, Jason Okundaye and Joseph Harker, all people of colour – were careful and thoughtful about the issues raised. However, the same cannot be said about the ‘news’ coverage. Its tenor was often to assume Professor Arday’s guilt – in circumstances where the only independent investigation had concluded he had not plagiarised and where (as I explained here) some of the factual claims against him had collapsed under scrutiny. 

I continue to believe that if Professor Arday had not been a working class, Black autistic man struggling to navigate the media frenzy, had had heavyweight help that was focused exclusively on his interests rather than the commercial interests of Simon & Schuster or the reputational consequences for Cambridge University and its colleges he would have been able to rebut many of the ‘stories’.

A now deleted Instagram reel for the Guardian’s podcast gave a good flavour of the shape of its coverage – the reel was filled with comedic titbits to drive engagement and shares. The attempts at balance were ersatz and it was clear what readers were invited to believe. Lanre Bakare was asked to remain at the heart of its coverage despite his personal history with Professor Arday. 

Put shortly, driven by the clickbait demands of its business model, the Guardian was an enthusiastic participant in what Lord Chris Smith, the Cambridge Chancellor, has rightly described as a “racist feeding frenzy”.

The Guardian’s initial piece was profoundly damaging to Professor Arday but, some may argue, justified, despite its tabloid headline. Its later news coverage is hard to justify on any basis – journalistic, moral, or public interest. Kath Viner seems to have ignored multiple public and private warnings about Professor Arday’s highly vulnerable mental state. 

There are also questions for her to answer about the decision to place Lanre Bakare at the heart of its news coverage. That having been said, as I said above, “I think he wrestled conscientiously in the piece with the points we discussed. And after the piece I wrote to him saying ‘I think that’s pretty fair, in all the circumstances… (Just in case you care.)’”

I imagine Mr Bakare is devastated by Professor Arday’s death. How does he now feel about the role he was given in circumstances where, as I have said, Kath Viner knew of Mr Bakare’s history with Professor Arday?

There may be legal consequences for the Guardian. But there must be editorial consequences. 

Why were Black and Brown journalists at the Guardian asked to do so the heavy lifting? Isn’t it the responsibility, too, indeed especially, of white people to help clear up a mess that white people have made?

What risk analysis was done by Kath Viner following the multiple warnings about Professor Arday’s mental state – from the member of our group, from Professor Baron Cohen and that she printed in her own newspaper from Professor Arday who spoke of how he had “reached the limits”? How did she balance what if any public interest remained with the risks to his wellbeing?

After we, yesterday, sent a right to reply to the Guardian with a 9am deadline detailing the points made in this article, it published this self-exculpatory leader column blaming the rightwing media and defending its own conduct.

But the many friends and students of Professor Jason Arday – I cannot speak for his family – deserve better. And so does the Guardian, if it is to continue to deserve its reputation.

In response to our detailed right of reply request, a Guardian spokesperson replied:

“This post is full of inaccuracies and distortions. The central assertion that Lanre Bakare and Jason Arday ‘did not see eye-to-eye’ or lacked trust is completely false. It was Professor Arday who approached Mr Bakare more than a year ago to discuss a story, rather than the other way round. Their interactions were mutually respectful, and their most recent communication concluded on warm and supportive terms. The idea that there was any antagonism in the relationship is completely baseless.”

• This piece was updated to include a reply from the Guardian and to accommodate a personal request from a Guardian journalist.
• The Canary has now published the letter sent to Kath Viner