The BBC’s reporting of Jason Arday’s resignation curiously includes details in his defence and has largely ignored the many well-reported points against him. He’s resigned lads – no need to defend him any more…
The BBC’s 10 p.m. report on his resignation focused on the fact that the original allegations of plagiarism were made by Nathan Cofnas, the US academic who was ejected from Cambridge thanks to his choice views on race. The BBC reporter also listed most of his excuses, including:
“He said that some errors in his earlier academic work could be related to his autism. And he also told the Times that there had been a concerted campaign to remove him from the university, which he argued was racially motivated… More than 16,000 people have signed a petition in support of him set up by the Good Law Project, but some academics have argued that there are now serious questions to answer.”
That ‘petition‘ is one of Jolyon’s Good Law Project data gathering exercises and can be signed by Mr Potato Head. The BBC’s written report also printed his defences extensively and brought up Cofnas again, despite his limited relevance to the case as a whole:
“Arday said some errors in his early academic work was because of his autism, as he relied on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics…
Accusations of plagiarism in Arday’s work were first voiced by Nathan Cofnas – a US researcher and self-defined ‘race realist’, whose role at a Cambridge college was terminated after backlash to his view that under a true meritocracy black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.’”
Widely-reported examples of the plagiarism are also ignored by the BBC. Do they want to hire him?
