There will be another Jason Arday.
We know this. Because the media knows this.
We are told the press ‘isn’t free’ if it lacks the impunity to do anything it likes. It is how power protects itself. By declaring it has none.
That is why there will be another Jason Arday.
It doesn’t matter that a 41-year-old took his life after days of disproportionate media coverage even after his resignation from Cambridge University.
It doesn’t matter that this mass exercise in hate-drenched fury, sneering, and self-righteousness was fuelled by his race and his class – and whether anyone wants to admit this or not. (No one argued that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, elected politicians no less, weren’t qualified enough to take the economy to the brink). Those in the media know that someone white and/or posh wouldn’t be denigrated in the same way. Because none of their actions are treated in this way. No matter the ‘truth’ of what they say.
It doesn’t matter that media outlets across the spectrum have had nothing much to write now that his children are without their father. That is not respect. That is the point. News cycles move on. Algorithms attract other eyeballs. Business as usual.
It doesn’t matter that columnists at a few of these outlets are now writing of their own ‘failure’ of Jason Arday. Because they will continue to take the money these outlets pay them. And, in doing so, shield these outlets of any blame.
It doesn’t matter that the rage-bait has moved on on social media platforms designed to ensure that other rage-bait takes its place. Some continue in their attacks. Hate pays.
It doesn’t matter that a human being was reduced to an object of lustful frenzy upon the instincts of the mob. Not when division and desensitisation is the operating system our dehumanising political-social-media culture runs on.
That is why there will be another Jason Arday.
Because there is no check to fetter power when unfettered power resides in the check.
There is no ‘neutral arbiter’. Only a media invested in its own status to shape how we see the world; who is ‘up’ and who is ‘down’; who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’; what happens to people’s lives. Only a media that cries ‘public interest’ even when it is not: it is the exercise of unchecked power.
There was a public interest seven years ago when this publication first reported on the questionable finances of Reform UK’s predecessor party and Nigel Farage and his association with a convicted fraudster who is “like a son”. No outlet followed up. Now they are fearless watchdogs.
After nearly a decade in which Farage has been elevated as the next prime minister-in-waiting, it is time to turn up the scrutiny so as not to get caught out backing the wrong horse. No matter that the horse long bolted because they opened the gate.
The media’s own interests; and the public interest: different stories, indeed.
That is why there’s not yet any media interest, enough to establish a public interest, in a follow-up of the six-month investigation, spanning some 20 sources, published by Byline Times last month about the institution the press has been fixated with day after day: Cambridge University.
There is not yet any public interest, it seems, in the activities of another – white, middle-class, right-wing – professor there, James Orr, who is simultaneously a public figure in political life as Farage’s Head of Policy at Reform. When this publication put to Cambridge the extensive findings of his activities at the university, including concerns around the safeguarding of students, the press office of my alma mater had nothing to say.
It passed our questions straight to Orr’s lawyers. When we asked it why, its only response – which it said we couldn’t publish – was to state that “we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry”. You can read the full investigation here and decide for yourself. (It redacts the name of the property from which Orr operates, and in which he houses students, in Cambridge – even though this is already in the public domain – because his lawyers argued that it would leave him open to the risk of violence).
That is why there will be another Jason Arday.
Because the same media that sees it as its right to scrutinise every detail of a person’s life even when the public interest is hard to justify, even when their vulnerability is clear, is the same media that refuses to hold a mirror up to itself. One rule for them, another for everyone else. I have written in these pages previously, and I will say it again: it is one of the biggest scandals and stories of our time. An ethical void that is depthless.
The media can’t be voted out. No one in political power is willing to go near it – precisely because of the unfettered power they fear will be unleashed upon them. But it is also because too many of us are more complicit in this than we would like to believe.
Through our passivity and easy consumption of that which we would never want to happen to ourselves, we go along with this as how things are. As the world burns and people struggle to hold it together, materially and psychologically, in these difficult times, by keeping our own heads down – staring at our feet or at our phones – we betray the powerless: those for whom no compassion, no redemption, no other possible way ahead is an option.
We turn a blind eye to our dehumanisation. We cannot – do not – lift our heads enough to comprehend that we could get to a point where there will never be another Jason Arday.
That is why there will be another Jason Arday.
Hardeep Matharu **is the Editor in Chief of **Byline Times
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