On The Guardian’s Weird, Possibly Defamatory Undermining Of Its Own (Good!) Jason Arday Reporting

On The Guardian’s Weird, Possibly Defamatory Undermining Of Its Own (Good!) Jason Arday Reporting

How do you explain this? And should I even still be writing about it?

Events reminders:

—New York: Village Underground with Jeff Maurer TONIGHT, Monday, November 2, to be followed by a joint after-party with “Central Air” co-hosts Megan McArdle, Josh Barro, and Ben Dreyfuss, and a gaggle of their listeners.

—Philadelphia: Next In Line Comedy with Jeff Maurer TOMORROW, Tuesday, November 3, to be followed by an election night watch party (ticket includes some food during said after-party).

—I’m on a panel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) Soapbox conference in Philly on Friday, November 6, but alas, the conference is sold out at the moment. “Reach out to us at [email protected] if you want to be added to the waitlist.”

Earlier this week The Guardian published an article by community affairs correspondent Chris Osuh that began thusly, bolding mine:

The University of Oxford’s Oriel College has been urged to cancel an event featuring Jason Arday’s accuser Nathan Cofnas that has been organised by student supporters of Reform UK.

Arday, 41, was found dead in August after resigning from his University of Cambridge professorship. He had faced intense media scrutiny after Cofnas made unproven accusations of plagiarism against him and said there were “serious questions” about his biographical claims.

Cofnas, a blogger and academic who has been accused of promoting pseudoscientific ideas of racial difference in his online writings, is expected to appear at an event called “An evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI undermining higher education?” at Oriel’s Harris lecture theatre on 17 November.

The bolded part referring to “unproven accusations of plagiarism” is wild. Wild! It links to another Osuh article — one that expresses no opinion about the accusations.

That phrasing is wild because, in fact, the allegations of plagiarism against Arday have been proven to any reasonable standard. Arday’s work contained thousands of plagiarized words. It’s unclear how any good-faith observer could dispute this: You can check the claim simply by reading the Cofnas post that set off this controversy and scrolling down to the lengthy list of side-by-side examples he provides. If this isn’t “proven” plagiarism, what is?

There has been an odd campaign, in certain lefty circles, to work backward from the tragedy of Arday’s death to the conclusion that he actually did little or nothing wrong. Hyperpartisan outlets have been pushing this narrative for months — Arday was just cleared of plagiarism allegations for a fourth time, we’re now being told (no) — and they’ve had some success: A significant faction of people believe there is no there there to the allegations, despite their self-evident nature. Instead, they insist, this was a racist smear campaign, if not a “lynching.” This narrative maps quite poorly onto reality.

It’s one thing for hyperpartisan outlets and random “independent journalists” to spread this nonsense, but this is The Guardian — a supposedly reputable newspaper and, to many, the UK’s most important.

There’s a pattern here. Chris Osuh appears to have written five articles about the Jason Arday affair. None of them clearly lays out the evidence against Arday. Perhaps most notably, none links to Cofnas’s blog post, even when such a link is obviously warranted.

Take this excerpt from an August article headlined “‘Old racist wine in a new bottle’: Black academics respond to Jason Arday affair”: “The row erupted this month after another academic – self-defined ‘race realist’ Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2024 – alleged he had found plagiarism in Arday’s work. A separate disciplinary investigation by Cambridge University found he did not breach the law and did not contravene university regulations. Cofnas had previously suggested in a blogpost that, in a meritocracy, there would be ‘close to zero’ Black professors at Harvard.”

It’s fine to bring up Cofnas’s controversial views — I mentioned them in my own New York Times column on this controversy — but it’s poor practice not to link to the meatiest, clearest presentation of the accusations, if not simply to let readers decide for themselves how serious they are. (To be fair, we can’t be sure whether this was Osuh’s decision or his editors’ — different publications and editors handle links in different ways.)

Later that month, Osuh led off another article on the affair with “Nathan Cofnas, the academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism, has been accused of having ‘very limited expertise’ for his academic role by professors also working at Ghent University, who say he has a ‘far-right agenda’.” You’d think this would be the place to link to the accusations proper! Again, no.

It’s quite strange to not link to that post while linking to all sorts of articles about Cofnas’s own controversies. It was that post, after all, that launched the whole controversy into the mainstream, in large part because other institutional actors had previously refused to do anything meaningful about Arday’s plagiarism and likely fabricated data. It also contains the clearest rundown I’ve seen of the actual plagiarism.

I’m not nitpicking solely on the basis of a missing link, though. You could read all of Osuh’s articles and come away with no idea that Cofnas’s allegations were, in fact, true, and that they had been internally reported well before Cofnas arrived on the scene, both of which seem like important details for putting Cofnas’s role into context. That’s true both of the plagiarism issue and the “serious questions about his biographical claims” Osuh mentions. In fact, Arday appears to have lied about significant parts of his biography, including the developmental delays he supposedly overcame.

I wouldn’t begrudge Osuh for throwing in an “alleged,” for the sake of super-cautious journalism, but “unproven”? How? Why? It’s just false.

What makes this even weirder is that The Guardian did some of the best work confirming these allegations! Lanre Bakare’s early-August feature helped break the story open, publicizing incredible new details, including that Arday appears to have simply made up a story about someone sending him a pig’s head to harass him.

Here’s how Bakare treated the plagiarism accusation:

Arday told the Guardian he fully supported “fair investigation processes for genuine concerns” of academic misconduct. He added: “To clarify, there have been multiple thorough investigations across several institutions as a result of the allegations, and immense scrutiny, including with an academic misconduct panel who concluded that there was no plagiarism or academic misconduct.”

But prominent academics of colour that the Guardian spoke to said the claims of plagiarism were legitimate, and that Arday’s alleged actions risked undermining others who study race.

Some of Arday’s peers said the fallout from the row could send shockwaves through academia and set the study of race in Britain back 20 years.

One academic, who has worked in the area of race and education for decades and spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, said the accusations against Arday were worrying. “I think it’s plagiarism and it’s obvious,” they said.

John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, said: “Having seen the evidence, it triangulates and there is, in my judgment, a case to answer here.”

I find the identitarianism here grating — it’s silly that Bakare had to reach for “prominent academics of colour” specifically, but still: This is as close as a journalist writing in that old-school, no-personal-opinions way is going to come to saying “Yes, this was plagiarism.”

Bakare, who for what it’s worth is black, has been harassed online by the slacktivist do-gooders who insist this was all a deadly, racist witch hunt. Always remember that a significant chunk of the people who claim to deeply value journalism only value journalism that is politically convenient to them. In my experience, the same self-appointed moral exemplars who will very publicly faint over Donald Trump’s dismal treatment of the press (a legitimate issue!) will frequently turn around and denounce, harass, and attempt to make miserable the lives of journalists like Bakare simply for having done their jobs the way journalists should do their jobs: “without fear or favor.”

There’s a game of journalist roulette going on here. If you read Bakare’s coverage of the Jason Arday affair, you will come away with an entirely different sense of the basic facts of the case than if you read Chris Osuh’s. That’s not good! We’re not talking about normal disagreement in the pages of a newspaper — one columnist favoring a tax hike and the other opposing it — but rather reporters, not columnists, covering the same controversy in wildly different ways, one of them (Bakare) doing so professionally and the other (Osuh) seeming to engage in all sorts of sleight of hand to obscure the full truth of the matter from readers.

I reached out to Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, to ask her about this. She passed me along to a comms person who said the paper has no comment.

The Guardian May Have Defamed Nathan Cofnas

One reason the passage I excerpted at the top of this piece jumped out at me is that the UK has famously strict defamation laws. Because of the article’s phrasing and the lack of any acknowledgement of the facts of the case, readers could easily come away thinking Nathan Cofnas had launched baseless claims against Arday that led to his death, which could of course damage Cofnas’s reputation.

I got in touch with Mark Stephens, a solicitor and leading expert on UK media and defamation law, to ask him whether the passage in question is potentially defamatory...

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© 2026 Jesse Singal
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