Jonathan Kay at Quillette – No, the Media Isn’t Responsible for Jason Arday’s Suicide. “The disgraced academic was a pathological liar and lifelong con artist whose misdeeds were covered up for years by self-serving academic administrators. Exposing this kind of rot in elite institutions is our job.”
During late July and early August, news outlets on both sides of the Atlantic lit up their hit counters with fresh disclosures about the bizarre claims that Arday had peddled over the years. He said that he’d been prophetically anointed as a social-justice Spartacus by a wise old villager during a trip to South America that never happened. He claimed that he’d been in a (non-existent) coma for weeks when he was a child, and that doctors had urged his parents to pull the (non-existent) plug before his miraculous recovery. He claimed that a racist (and completely imaginary) would-be killer wearing a mask had stalked him in Cambridge’s academic halls, and that other racists had sent (equally non-existent) pig heads to his house. These lies were so grotesque that even left-wing media outlets that (by sheer force of habit) had originally seemed receptive to Arday’s claims of a vast racist conspiracy pivoted to an attitude of pointed scepticism.
While liars and con artists are a dime a dozen, they usually find their marks among lonely widows and art-world dilettantes. Arday’s example was astonishing because the people he dazzled (or who pretended to be dazzled, at any rate) included the brain trust at Cambridge University—which is to say, some of the (supposedly) smartest people on the face of the planet. Their gullibility (or cynicism) has always been the real story here.
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