Media Murder: The Time of Monsters

Arguably Emile Durkheim's most valuable contribution to sociology was his book Suicide. In it he explains very clearly that suicide is not a personal or individual matter. Suicide is always affected by the social/cultural/political. There will no doubt be attempts by those the media or media apologists, to personalise and individualise Jason Arday's death.

These will be dishonest.

To contextualise; three years ago another Cambridge academic was found guilty of plagiarism. He was allowed to stay in his job and there was no frenzied mainstream media witch-hunt.

He is white.

In contrast Jason Arday was not found guilty of plagiarism but was subjected to a savage, brutal and relentless stream, of attacks by mainstream media.

He was black.

A media onslaught of this kind is brutal and relentless because the media's owners want it to be. They want to end diversity in academia and return to the days of academics being entirely old, conservative, cishet, white men. They want universities to be the kind of places where the neoliberal establishment consensus is not challenged. This is also behind the Burnham government's (deniable) attempts to push out of academia academics who present alternative views to the establishment status quo. We have a neoliberal status quo the failings of which are revealing themselves as increasingly fragile. Academia provides plenty of solid alternative ways of critiquing the status quo and looking at the world including;

• Intersectional Feminism,
• Critical Race Theory,
• Queer Theory,
• Post-Colonial Studies,
• the study of climate change,
• new approaches to economics
• Critical Theory in general.

But now is truly the time of monsters. Obscenely wealthy monsters who need to deploy scapegoating in order to protect the fragility of the current social order, monsters who openly support fascism. It is also a neoliberal status quo that needs scapegoats. Immigrants, especially those fleeing war and persecution, Muslims, trans people, Romany travellers, disabled people and neurodiverse people have recently been used as convenient scapegoats by the monsters of the government/media complex. But I have always felt that this establishment most want to scapegoat black people. The vicious, relentless and unjustified assault on Jason Arday was another chance to do this.

This is not press freedom, it is bullying, victimisation and propaganda. It has become evident in recent years that mainstream media regards itself more than ever, as a propaganda mouthpiece for its obscenely rich owners, these and the propagandists who work for them are the real monsters determined to prevent a new world from being born. Diversity and equality has always been the enemy of these people, and whatever hook they can use on which to hang that propaganda function will be used ruthlessly, especially when the target of that ruthless witch-hunt is unable to fight back.

The number of articles in this instance was overwhelming and reminiscent of the media overkill deployed against trans people in the period 2019 to 2024, when just four news platforms (Guardian, Sun, Times, Telegraph) published 17,000 articles (that's 9 a day for five years) about trans people - almost all of which were hostile and almost none of which were written by trans people, culminating in 2023 when the media as a whole published 6,500 in just one year (equivalent to 18 a day). In the case of Jason Arday there were 249 articles published in just 22 days (11 a day) The media knows the effectiveness of repetition in propaganda.

The reasons for this overkill - the desperate need for the media owners and obscenely rich to protect their status quo and their lack of diversity of opinions and reporting - are connected. In my view the media is directly implicated in the death of Jason Arday, and used the same techniques it used against trans primary school teacher and media murder victim Lucy Meadows.

That is why I am characterising this as "Media Murder". The systematic targeting of an individual in a way that demonises them, scapegoats them, rouses the rabble against them, destroys them socially and deprives them of hope is apparently a price the media has decided it is prepared to pay. The death of Jason Arday shows just how badly UK media needs to be reformed. Doubtless there will be articles attempting to distract from this cause and articles attempting to personalise and individualise his tragic death. However when we apply Durkheim's framework for understanding suicide, the main cause of Jason Arday's death was quite obviously media racism driven by its extremist politics.

The racist, rightwing UK media killed Jason Arday, this was a media murder.