What’s the Matter with the British Press?

The coverage of Jason Arday highlighted profound problems with right-wing outlets. The country’s media crisis is still unfolding.

It should be clear by now to anyone paying attention that the media coverage of Jason Arday—a forty-one-year-old Black British former professorial chair at the University of Cambridge, who died this month—was racist (fueled by an academic who espouses pseudoscientific anti-Black views), disproportionate (more than two hundred articles were published in the span of a few weeks), and utterly tragic. The frenzy took place during what is described in the United Kingdom as “silly season”: at the height of summer, when Parliament is in recess, the prime minister often goes on vacation, and reporters are in need of a story. But more profoundly, the Arday coverage surfaced an ugly strain of sensationalism that has long been present within the British press—and reflected a MAGA-fication that recently has taken over elements of Britain’s media ecosystem.