The Jason Arday story continues to surprise. I didn’t believe that there would still be much to talk about regarding this man’s individual story nearly a week after his death, even though I thought it was clear that his rise and fall exposed deep problems in academia. Instead, the reaction of the British left to the entire episode has been clarifying, and helps explain how we got a figure like Jason Arday in the first place.
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I'm glad that the American center-left media has recalibrated somewhat since peak wokeness. But the fact that no one was willing to break this story in the first place except Cofnas tells us things are not as copacetic as Hanania would have us believe.
I agree with the thrust of your point but it's too generous to parts of the establishment, non-fringe media imo. Take the BBC's coverage, to choose one example, which has been staggeringly awful and ideologically slanted. As it generally is on a range of different subjects ranging from wokeness to Israel to Brexit etc. A recent Spectator (better than the BBC) piece sums this up:
'The BBC spent years uncritically promoting the myth of Arday. Prior to July 2026, the broadcaster produced at least 11 radio programmes (totalling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles, and two TV interviews championing the academic and repeating his false claims.
When the initial story broke about his plagiarism and lies, the BBC doubled down on its defence of the academic. The first article which I would say features real criticism of the former professor was published on 6 August, a day after he resigned, more than two weeks after the original Arday exposé was published on Substack, and six years after the BBC’s first hagiographic piece about the late academic.
This was nothing short of a six-year propaganda campaign by the BBC on Jason Arday’s behalf
In that time journalists across the world published revelations detailing Arday’s long history of lies and exaggerations, from publications as diverse as the Telegraph and the Daily Mail to the Guardian and the New York Times. For weeks, the BBC ignored them all.
Following Arday’s death, the corporation has returned to its less-than-impartial reporting of the matter. Throughout the saga, the BBC has spent more resources smearing Arday’s exposer, the former Cambridge academic Nathan Cofnas, and participated in a genuine witch hunt against him. Even in articles detailing accusations of plagiarism against Arday, it is clear that the real enemy of the story was the infamous ‘race realist’ Cofnas.'