Jason Arday’s body was barely cold before the ‘progressive’ consensus had formed on the cause of death. This was not the suicide it appeared to be, but a ‘lynching’ – the inevitable, willful destruction of an innocent, obscure academic by a deceitful, racist and right-wing media. The relentless scrutiny of the former Cambridge professor’s work, qualifications and life story – wildly out of proportion with his wrongdoings and public status – supposedly proved fatal.

The trouble with this telling is that it is a lie. The press, for all its faults, actually did its duty in the Arday affair. It asked tough questions about a powerful plagiarist (a professorial chair is no minor academic role) and a major public institution (Cambridge University), which had fallen for, promoted and covered up his deceptions. And journalists did this in the face of financially ruinous libel action, organised smear campaigns calling them racist, and even possible arrest. Yet it is the press that is now being lined up for punishment.

Of course, there have been the usual suspects – namely, the woke race obsessives – who you’d expect to join in the digital witch-hunt against the press. Indeed, Ibram X Kendi, Kehinde Andrews and Black Lives Matter UK were all quick to accuse the press of ‘lynching’ the Cambridge professor. More worryingly, the establishment has closed ranks, too. On Monday, Cambridge don Lord Simon Woolley, at a vigil for the deceased, claimed that Arday was the victim of a ‘public execution’, instigated ‘by the wicked, evil people who dragged his name through the mud’. Even a former Archbishop of Canterbury joined in the baying mob pronouncing a ‘debased media culture and the fever-ridden jungle of online comment’ guilty for Arday’s untimely demise. A righteous mob had formed, demanding a crucifixion.

Smearing the journalists who did their duty would not be enough, however. A viral Instagram post named and shamed the journalists who, it claimed, had contributed to the ‘insanely revolting and unnecessary scrutiny’ of Arday before his death. It demanded ‘any information, personal or professional’ on 16 writers, declaring them ‘collectively responsible’ for his untimely demise. The exact form of reprisals that would be meted out was not stated.

Others arrived at the scene with a pre-existing agenda, demanding the state regulation and censorship of the media. On the weekend of Arday’s death, the Good Law Project launched a petition calling for an ‘immediate public inquiry’ into the media, insisting that ‘Dr Arday’s tragic death was the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment’. It was signed by Green Party leader Zack Polanski, Labour MPs Diane Abbott, Nadia Whittome and Bell Ribiero-Addy, and actress Jameela Jamil – as well as 110,000 others. A widely shared Change.org petition demands an ‘Arday’s Law’ that would cap the number of articles that can be published about any given public figure.

That such policies would trample on press freedom does not concern the mob one jot. ‘Freedom of the press’, declared Polanski on X, ‘must never be the freedom to… push misinformation and lies’. In a party-conference motion called ‘Justice for Jason Arday’, Green Party members are proposing to create something akin to a UK Ministry of Truth, in which a media regulator can police the ‘consciences’ of journalists and ‘robustly moderate’ online content deemed harmful to the subjects of press interest.

But the only purveyors of ‘misinformation’ in this sorry saga have been Arday and his ardent defenders. For one thing, they have lied about the provenance of the initial plagiarism allegation. They point the finger at Nathan Cofnas, a self-described ‘race realist’, who published extensive and damning evidence of plagiarism on his Substack last month. But concerns had been raised about Arday for years. In 2023, academic Dave Harris put questions to Arday about the ‘puzzling similarities’ between his doctoral thesis and the work of others. In response, Arday called the police, accusing Harris of racial harassment. In 2025, Jack Grove from the THE followed up the allegations, only to receive a letter from notorious defamation lawyers Carter Ruck and a phone call from the police, warning him never to contact Arday again. When the allegations were put to Cambridge, it backed its star professor continuously until he resigned earlier this month, when the media scrutiny made that position untenable.

As for the volume of coverage, this was surely in keeping with the importance of Arday’s role and the magnitude of his fabrications. He did not merely claim to have had a challenging life – he claimed at times to have survived and recovered from non-verbal autism, locked-in syndrome, two brain tumours and testicular cancer. He claimed not only to have been athletic, but also to have played football for Crystal Palace, played semi-professional snooker and run 30 marathons in 35 days (nine on a broken leg). He said he was on the TV show Seven Up, even though it aired several decades before he was born. To dismiss all this as a non-story, or merely about plagiarism or a few minor academic errors, as his defenders now do, is to ignore what made the scandal so compelling.

Nor was the Arday affair merely ginned up by the right. One of the most damning exposés came from the Guardian. Indeed, it was black Guardian journalist Lanre Bakare who exposed Arday’s lurid false claim that he had been sent a severed pig’s head in the post. The New York Times found evidence that Arday’s claim to have grown up as ‘non-verbal’ was false, witheringly concluding that his remarkable trajectory ‘had no precedent in medical literature’.

Was it wrong for the press to focus on Arday’s race or to examine his rise through the prism of DEI? Not when you consider how racialised the coverage was when he first came to prominence. Arday, Cambridge and much of the media continuously hailed him as ‘Cambridge’s youngest black professor’ at the time of his hiring. What’s more, the decision to hire him was made in the wake of Black Lives Matter, when Cambridge was attempting to atone for past racial sins. Race was undoubtedly a factor in elevating a man whom the New York Times bluntly described as being ‘an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards’.

Throughout the Arday affair, the free press has displayed precisely the qualities that make it so essential to a liberal, democratic society. It has told the truth, exposed the lies of an individual and the corruption of institutions. In the face of smears and threats, it pushed doggedly for the truth.

The alternative to a free press is a media environment where powerful individuals can silence legitimate questions. It’s one where internationally renowned institutions can cover up their wrongdoing and avoid all accountability. The Jason Arday scandal is proof of press freedom’s necessity. Shame on those vultures who would exploit a man’s death to crush this most vital and precious of liberties.