CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Liberal Press and the Violence of Neutrality: Spectacle and the Destruction of Jason Arday

Jason Arday speaking at the Society for Experimental Biology symposium. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

The controversy surrounding the death of Jason Arday has produced a revealing moment of institutional self-defense, if not abject moral cowardice, within the liberal press. Three recent interventions are especially instructive. The Guardianhas defended its reporting on Arday as legitimate and responsible journalism while condemning the racialized abuse directed at its journalists. Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times, warns against allowing outrage over Arday’s treatment to become an attack on press freedom. And Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, reduces Arday’s tragedy to a story of fraud, psychological collapse, and self-delusion. The arguments differ, but they share a deeply troubling assumption: the liberal press acknowledges that something terrible happened to Arday while positioning itself outside the machinery of power that made his public destruction and tragic self-inflicted death possible.

That assumption deserves to be challenged because it does little to illuminate the sordid constellation of forces that contributed to Arday’s death and much to legitimate and normalize them, including the press’s own role in their operation. What these interventions share is a language that helps produce what João Biehl calls “zones of social abandonment,” spaces in which individuals are rendered invisible, severed from the histories and relations of power that have shaped their lives, and subjected to what he calls “domestic machineries of inscription and invisibility.” Arday increasingly appears within this language less as a living human being with a history, a voice, and a complex subjectivity than as an object to be scrutinized, classified, judged, and abandoned. This is the violence concealed within the language of distance and objectivity parading as journalistic truth-telling: the subjectivity of the other disappears, power retreats from view, and a human life is reduced to the accusations, failures, and judgments inscribed upon it.

None of this places Arday beyond legitimate scrutiny. There is no question that allegations of plagiarism are legitimate subjects of journalistic investigation. Nor should criticism of the press become an argument for censorship. Academic integrity matters, and freedom of the press (especially in the age of Trumpism) remains indispensable to any democratic society. But these principles cannot become shields protecting powerful media institutions from scrutiny of their own power. Beyond whether particular stories were factually justified lies a more consequential question: what happens when legitimate investigation mutates through repetition and amplification into spectacle, and spectacle into a sustained form of public prosecution? What happens when the mainstream media cease to see Arday as a human being caught within and marked by a constellation of historical, racial, institutional, and economic forces, and instead reduce a life shaped largely by power, vulnerability, struggle, and contradiction to the deadening logic of the spectacle?

The distinction matters because journalism does not operate in a political vacuum. Newspapers and other major corporate-controlled media are not neutral conduits through which facts pass into public consciousness. They are far from impartial. They select, frame, repeat, rank, circulate, and dramatize. They decide whose failures become national stories and whose disappear without notice. Concentrated increasingly in the hands of billionaires and corporate elites such as Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, the media landscape is shaped by enormous concentrations of economic, cultural, and political power. The issue extends beyond the political orientation of individual billionaires to the concentration of cultural and pedagogical power itself and its capacity to shape public consciousness, determine what becomes visible and what disappears, whose voices matter, and whose lives can be rendered disposable. These institutions and platforms possess immense agenda-setting and reputational power, operating within an economy in which attention is currency, scandal generates circulation, controversy produces clicks, and human vulnerability can be transformed into commercially valuable material.

 Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Lowery gives this argument added force when he observes that “the act of journalism, no matter how much we may fetishize the idea of objectivity, requires a series, a pyramid, of subjective decision-making,” decisions historically made “almost exclusively by upper-class white men.” Recognizing that values, histories, and ideological assumptions shape journalistic judgment does not mean abandoning fairness, evidence, or factual accuracy. It means abandoning the fiction that truth can be pursued from nowhere. Objectivity too often silences the very questions journalism should be asking about power, while the pursuit of truth demands something more difficult: the civic courage to make power visible, to give human suffering a history, and to recognize that truth severed from justice can become another language through which domination hides itself. As Roger Berkowitz notes, truth demands humility, trust, and honesty, beginning with an acknowledgment of the journalist’s own assumptions, prejudices, politics, and values. Such self-reflection has little currency in a liberal media culture that too often treats its own values as invisible.

This refusal of self-scrutiny has profound consequences. The liberal press routinely conceals its own agency behind the language of objectivity and neutrality, presenting itself less as an institution making political choices than as a transparent window onto reality. This is the mythology of institutional innocence. Its reporters allegedly merely follow evidence, its editors merely apply professional standards, and its publications merely inform the public. This vocabulary makes the press’s own interventions disappear. Selection becomes “news judgment.” Framing becomes “context.” Repetition becomes “public interest.” A campaign of exposure becomes “accountability.”

Objectivity, in this institutional sense, does not mean the absence of perspective. It means the authority to define one’s own perspective as no perspective at all. The liberal press’s greatest illusion is not that it is always correct, but that its authority exempts it from recognizing its own ideology. Politics becomes visible only when it challenges established power; the operation of power itself disappears beneath the reassuring language of balance, civility, and objectivity. Neutrality is not the opposite of politics; it is often politics stripped of its own name. Market values, elite authority, racial hierarchy, and institutional privilege are rendered politically invisible, treated instead as the natural background against which journalism operates. The result is not impartiality but the concealment of power.

The fiction of neutral language has become increasingly difficult to sustain. According to The Intercept, a leaked 2024 internal memo revealed that New York Times editors instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on Gaza to restrict the use of terms such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” avoid the phrase “occupied territory,” and exercise similar caution with “refugee camps” and the word “Palestine” when referring to Palestinian land. Whatever one thinks of those editorial decisions, they expose a larger truth: journalists never simply discover language; it is governed through institutional judgments about which descriptions appear legitimate and which remain unsayable. Objectivity, in practice, often means regulating vocabulary while denying that such regulation is political. This is the language of subterfuge and normalization, a vocabulary that conceals its own politics while legitimating oppressive conditions and dominant relations of power.

The liberal press often imagines itself occupying a moral position above politics, while quietly reproducing the assumptions of the institutions, classes, and racial hierarchies from which it draws its authority. It can report on a political conflict while excluding its own role in shaping the terms of that conflict. This has been particularly true in its refusal to name Israel’s act of genocide in Gaza, Trump’s overt and relentless racism and white nationalism, and the rise of fascism in the United States. It can describe a racialized backlash while presenting its own coverage as untouched by racial meaning. It can insist that it is simply reporting what happened even when its choices determine what becomes visible, urgent, and nationally significant.

But the politics of objectivity cannot be separated from the political economy of the institutions that invoke it. The problem, then, reaches far beyond the intentions or integrity of individual journalists. It resides in the enormous concentration of economic and cultural power that determines who owns the commanding institutions of public communication, who controls the conditions under which journalists work, and which ideas are granted legitimacy, visibility, and circulation. The boundaries of the sayable are often established long before an individual reporter begins to write.

Jeff Bezos made this brutally explicit when he ordered The Washington Post opinion pages to defend “personal liberties and free markets,” declaring that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Here the mythology of journalistic neutrality collapses under the weight of concentrated ownership itself. What presents itself as an open marketplace of ideas is revealed as a cultural apparatus whose owners possess the power to determine which ideas may enter the marketplace at all. Objectivity, under such conditions, becomes more than an ideological alibi; it becomes a mask for concentrated power, concealing the economic interests, institutional hierarchies, and structures of ownership that police the boundaries of legitimate speech while presenting those boundaries as the natural order of things.

The sheer scale and intensity of the coverage directed at Arday makes the question of proportionality impossible to evade. A NewsCord Media audit documented 249 pieces published about Arday across 15 British national media outlets during a 22-day period, including 188 in the nine days between his resignation and his death. Its original census attributed forty-four pieces to The Times and Sunday Times, forty-three to The Telegraph, and thirty-eight to the Daily Mail/MailOnline. The precise count has subsequently been refined, but the magnitude of the coverage remains unmistakable. This was no longer simply journalism responding to a developing story. It had become an industry of exposure.

The racial disparity becomes even more difficult to ignore when another Cambridge University case is placed beside it. As Guardian columnist Jason Okundaye pointed out, when Cambridge historian William O’Reilly faced allegations in 2023 that he had plagiarized material from student essays, the resulting press coverage amounted to barely half a dozen articles. A university tribunal subsequently concluded that the plagiarism resulted from negligent rather than deliberate........

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