What sounds more like a mob to you? Reporters asking questions about a professor’s CV and backstory? Or swarms of the perpetually offended damning those reporters as racists, fascists, scum, even murderers?
It’s the latter, isn’t it? This is the bleak irony of the Jason Arday tragedy: his self-styled defenders decry the media mob while forging their own frothing mob. They accuse journalists of destroying a man’s life even as they hound those journalists, and libel them as ‘lynchers’, and demand that they face the kangaroo justice of a public shaming.
Arday’s death was a ‘modern-day lynching’, say self-styled anti-racists
The people with blood in their nostrils are not the newspapermen who only did their jobs and asked probing questions about a public figure. It’s the vengeance seekers of the bourgeois left, whose violent dream of muzzling the free press has been turbo-charged by the horrible events of the past few days. They scare me far more than the press ever could.
The dreadful death of Jason Arday following weeks of media scrutiny of his credentials has given rise to a truly toxic atmosphere. The left, once again, has turned its guns on the press. Digital mobs accuse journalists of ‘hounding’ Arday to death. They’re tarring decent reporters as the aiders and abetters of ‘murder’. Even I – who wrote little about Arday – have received direct messages calling me a ‘killer’.
In recent days, the rhetoric has been dialled up to inflammatory levels. Arday’s death was a ‘modern-day lynching’, say self-styled anti-racists. In this grim vision, reporters are painted as the moral reincarnates of Klansmen: white supremacists in Next suits who did with words what evil men once did with nooses. It is an outrageous slander.
We’re now even seeing the circulation of lists of these ‘lynching’ journalists. Across social media the performatively enraged are naming the most scurrilous hacks and asking for ‘information’ about them. Perhaps they want to hone in their illiberal harassment, and target it directly at the KKK lowlifes who stink up our media. Listen, when people start sharing lists of the despicable, roll-calls of scum, you know we have crossed the line into a tyrannical moment.
Then there was the supposed vigil for Arday in Trafalgar Square last night. A vigil for the late Arday is a fine idea: his death is a tragedy and his friends and followers are cut up about it. Yet that gathering felt more like a mass screech of rage against the ‘vicious’ media than a quiet tribute to a late professor. Attendees mauled the gutter press and its ‘relentless campaign’ against a black man.
Journalists need to stand up to this crusade of defamation. Editors too. The media did what it is meant to do: found a fascinating story and it told it. I know some of the journalists who wrote about Arday. The idea that they thought to themselves ‘Look, a black man at Cambridge, let’s take him down’ is preposterous beyond belief. It is a slur far more vile and truthless than anything the media said about Arday.
The stakes are high. The very liberty to utter is on the line. There are now cries for a public inquiry into the media coverage of Arday, and even for new legislation to ‘cap news coverage of any individual within a set time frame’. They’re calling it Arday’s Law.
Let us be clear: this would be an intolerable assault on the freedom of the press. Nobody – not the state, not the ‘moral majority’ and certainly not noisy mobs of ideological crusaders – has the right to tell the press what it can cover and for how long. Our forbears did not fight and die for the sacred liberty to speak only for silver-spoon leftists to trash it now on the back of a tragic death. Such exploitative despotism must not stand.
From the very dawn of press freedom in the 1600s, the powerful have argued that newspapers can ‘hurt’ people with their words and thus they must be gagged and humbled every now and then.
Back then they called fruity commentary ‘seditious libel’, as they sought to ringfence princes and bishops from the critical pens of lowlife scribes. Now they call it a ‘media lynching’, as they seek to shield professors, leftists and the state religion of DEI from the lowly scrutiny of heartless hacks. The instinct is unchanged: to curb the hard-won liberty of the English press in the cynical name of saving people from moral harm.
We cannot allow the mob – the real mob – to get its way. We cannot allow the left to exploit a personal tragedy in the service of its long-standing animus to press freedom. This macabre, liberty-dreading mob needs to be confronted, and shut down.
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