In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.A tragic and important story is unfolding in the United Kingdom that has captivated the attention of the entire world. Naturally, left-wing politicians, activists, and media are learning the exact opposite of the correct lesson from the whole sordid affair.All hell broke loose after former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday died on Friday, in what many suspect was a death by suicide. This came after widespread media furor surrounding the embattled professor who had climbed to the highest levels of British society on the back of his racial identity and life story but was shown to have committed plagiarism, falsified data, and lied extensively about his life and accomplishments.
The depths of Arday’s deceit are incredible in the truest sense: They leave you genuinely incredulous.“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,” the brilliant writer Fraser Myers chronicled for Spiked. “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,” he continues. “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’.”Even this recounting only scratches the surface of Arday’s lies. What’s more, when critics attempted to bring evidence of the former professor’s fraudulence to light, he responded by reporting them to the police — leading to monthslong investigations into his critics.And this all comes in the context that Arday was welcomed into a prestigious perch at Cambridge and given almost farcically uncritical coverage by elite media institutions such as the BBC, specifically because of his identity as a black academic and despite what even the New York Times deemed insufficient qualifications for his appointment.Torchbearer Jason Arday carries the Olympic Flame on the Torch Relay leg between Sutton and Merton, in London, July 23, 2012. (Joe Giddens/LOCOG/PA via AP)
