The death of Jason Arday, following weeks of news coverage of his life and career, has prompted calls for a new inquiry into press standards. The University of Cambridge academic faced an overwhelming volume of comment from international news organisations, broadcasters, digital-native publications and the public on social media. His family said it all had a catastrophic impact on his life. I should underline from the start that I have enormous sympathy for what Arday went through, and my thoughts are with his family and friends.
Given the demands from some politicians and pressure groups for a public inquiry into the press’s actions in reporting on Arday, it is worth looking at how newspapers covered the emergence of the plagiarism allegations against him, the claims he made about his life and career, his resignation from Cambridge, his death and the reaction to it.
There is a lot of potential material to consider, and a variety of approaches could be employed. Here, I have looked at substantive articles published in the print editions of national newspapers. I haven’t included articles published solely on newspaper websites, nor newspapers’ social media or multimedia output. Nor have I analysed broadcaster or social media output. There is a vast amount of other content that could, and no doubt will in due course, be considered.
However, given that there is pressure for an inquiry into the press, it is sensible to begin with the print editions, which remain a core driver of newspapers’ news-gathering and commissioning processes.
I have looked at the number and type of articles published, and the key themes that they engaged with. I haven’t conducted a close textual reading, rather categorising the overarching themes of an article. I have only considered substantive articles produced by a search using data analysis by the company LexisNexis from July 25, the day the plagiarism allegations were first reported, until August 20. Where a story was repeated in different editions of the newspapers, I disregarded duplicates, and I discounted letters to the editor, promotions or indexes, as well as passing references in articles that were primarily about something else.
I wanted to focus on articles that were chiefly about Arday, his work or the fallout from the events of the past month. That said, I don’t disregard the impact that all of these additional pieces of output may have had on Arday – they contributed to the intense volume of content that has been created during these weeks.
The LexisNexis results produced a result of 553 articles from 14 publications. Cleaning the data produced a final corpus of 242 articles for consideration. The Times produced the most articles – 53 in the daily edition and a further eight in the Sunday Times.
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The data about the articles, the date of publication, the type of article, and its themes were coded by hand; the figures in this article were created using AI to visualise the data. There were two peaks in coverage: after Arday resigned from Cambridge University on August 5 and following his death on August 14.
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The start of the coverage
The plagiarism allegations were first reported by the Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail on July 25. The Times and the Daily Telegraph continue to report the story regularly from the last days of July, with other newspapers starting to publish around the time of Arday’s resignation. In the days that followed, a significant number of articles were published.
Most of the articles are news stories about the developing situation. But there are also several opinion-led pieces too. The Times publishes 30 news stories and 13 opinion pieces, as well as news analysis, leaders, a review of Arday’s memoir, and the only interview with the academic.
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The coverage begins with questions about plagiarism in his academic work, but quickly moves to consider Arday’s wider claims about his life, pegged to the imminent publication of his memoir. From the very beginning, some newspapers frame questions about Arday’s work in the context of Cambridge’s efforts to diversify its academic workforce. The Daily Telegraph’s first story is headlined “Cambridge’s diversity pin-up in plagiarism row”. This sets the tone for much of the subsequent reporting.
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From relatively early on, concerns are raised about the amount of reporting and comment the story is generating through both the press and social media. The Times journalist Giles Coren writes about Arday twice in his columns on August 1 and 11. On both occasions, he raises questions about the volume and impact of the coverage. Coren has subsequently been criticised for his choice of language – he referred to everyone “slaughtering” Arday – but he is clearly critical of the way the story is being covered.
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Finally, there is the question of the proportionality of the coverage. To what extent were newspapers dealing with questions of legitimate public interest, rather than pursuing a story that had captured a degree of public enthusiasm, with consequent financial benefits to their publications?
While it is true that allegations of run-of-the-mill academic misconduct seem unlikely to interest journalists, it is also true that Arday was an emerging public intellectual. His media appearances – including on BBC Question Time and guest editing Radio 4’s Today – plus the publication of a mainstream commercial memoir featuring a range of extraordinary claims, meant he inevitably had a higher profile than his peers.
Many of the news stories in the sample do attempt to answer questions that are legitimate to ask. On the other hand, some people have expressed the view that the coverage was motivated by racism from the start – Arday’s former mentor at Cambridge Lord Simon Woolley referred to his friend being “hounded to death”.
Framing associated with race is present throughout the sample, and some articles explicitly accuse Cambridge of only appointing Arday as a professor because of the colour of his skin. For example columnist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s article in The Sun on August 7 was headlined “Prof hasn’t been hounded from job because he is black…it looks like he only got the job because he is black”.
There is no question that some journalists, opinion columnists in particular, viewed this story through the lens of wider battles over culture. Was it proportionate? I hope editors will reflect on that at some length. But as I pointed out at the beginning, the newspaper coverage is only a part of the volume of content created. All of those who’ve contributed to the firehose of comment need to reflect on their part in it.
The victim in all of this is unquestionably Arday. There may have been questions that he needed to answer about his life and work. But the penalty he paid for being caught at the heart of this firestorm was out of all proportion to any offence he may have committed.
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