In August, Cambridge’s youngest, widely celebrated black professor apparently committed suicide shortly after resigning amid plagiarism allegations — three days after his eagerly awaited book had dropped. Plenty of blame has been assigned. At Right Times, David Keighley looks at the BBC’s lukewarm effort to come to terms with its role:

The intervention was disclosed in an exclusive report by Deadline journalist Jake Kanter on September 9. There has so far been no public BBC announcement of the exercise and News-watch has found no independent confirmation of Brittin’s Arday remarks. But, according to Kanter, on September 9 Brittin told an all-staff BBC briefing that the media coverage ‘seems to have directly contributed to a tragedy’. He said he had asked BBC News to examine its own coverage and compare it with that of other media organisations, while adding that he believed the Corporation had ‘played the coverage very straight’. Which presumably was the key purpose of the enquiry to find out.

“Judge, Jury and Defendant: The BBC Is Set to Clear Itself Over Its Jason Arday Coverage,” September 10, 2026

As Keighley suggests, the BBC may seek to avoid an honest assessment of the role that elevating Arday’s reputation contributed to the impact of his fall.

Meanwhile, at Britain’s Daily Sceptic, Will Jones offers excerpts from evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s Opinion piece in Chronicles of Higher Education (September 9, 2026, paywalled) on Nature’s response to the affair: “Jason Arday and the Corruption of Science: An editorial in ‘Nature’ chooses progressive ideology over basic honesty.”

It’s tragic that Arday killed himself. But the frenzy to blame every person and institution for Arday’s death save Arday himself is bizarre. That Nature should join this frenzy lays bare the extent to which even the most prestigious journals have prioritized political sloganeering over truth seeking.

Disparaging merit in favour of equity, shifting research funding towards progressive topics, misrepresenting science by skewing citations towards researchers having approved backgrounds, censoring papers, controlling language and distorting accepted science so that it conforms to certain narratives while proscribing research on topics considered taboo — such symptoms of ideological pollution are present in journals across the sciences. Here are three examples, all involving Nature journals.

In 2023, a group of climate scientists published a paper in Nature making the strong claim that the increase of wildfires in California resulted almost entirely from anthropogenic climate change — a claim instantly picked up by the media. But right after publication, Patrick T. Brown, the paper’s first author, confessed that he deliberately ignored other causes of wildfires because climate change was the narrative that Nature preferred and it would therefore enhance the odds that his paper would be accepted.

“Jason Arday and the Corruption of Science,” September 10, 2026

Oh.

The rush on the part of academics to blame media (who can slough off responsibility and reroute the blame to nameless others) is easier to understand once we see that it is only the tip of much bigger scandals.