Hundreds of stories about one Black Cambridge professor expose the racial double standards, concentrated power and mythology of objectivity embedded in modern journalism.

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.

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