Mediaite ONE SHEET: Jason Arday and the Media, Mark Kelly’s Possible WH Bid, and More!

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Politics UK/X

TOP STORY

Cambridge University is facing questions after the death of Jason Arday, the school’s youngest-ever professor, but some are placing blame on the shoulders of the media. That’s especially true of the British media, which published hundreds of articles dissecting the rumors surrounding Arday in the weeks before his death on August 14.

Arday, whose family described him as “a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone” in a statement shared by his publisher Simon & Schuster UK on Sunday, resigned from Cambridge amid allegations he plagiarized and manufactured parts of his work and life story. Journalist Ash Sakar noted that Arday is not the first professor to face such allegations, but he “was the first where those things became a front-page story, across multiple papers, for days and days.”

Stand Up To Racism UK also accused the “right wing press and far right” of orchestrating “a racist witch hunt which has produced the most tragic result,” in their own statement.

Arday’s death and its many implications, particularly about the press’ role in his swift and relentless takedown, are likely to continue to reverberate through media and academic circles for weeks to come. It’s also likely to spark a strong response. As author and Rice University professor Kiese Laymon put it, “Academia is a graveyard. I have lived here for three decades. I, too, am a ghoul. I bite back. I suggest we all use that ghoul we wish did not exist to bite back.”

THREE TAKES

CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — Arday’s death has prompted “a reckoning,” Stelter wrote Monday morning. Though he didn’t offer his own commentary on what unfolded over the course of the last few weeks, Stelter pointedly elevated the words of others. “Some are blaming the media’s intense scrutiny of Arday’s plagiarism and other ethical lapses for driving him to suicide,” Stelter wrote. And per two sources — journalist Alan Rusbridger and author Ibram X. Kendi, that appears to be true. Rusbridger wrote Arday was driven to breakdown as part of a “death by a thousand headlines” and Kendi darkly predicted that “the media will bury its culpability while we bury Jason.”

CJR’s The Media Today, Jem Bartholomew — The press in the U.K. is “facing criticism” due to its coverage of Arday, Bartholomew mildly put it this morning. Bartholomew noted The Good Law Project has called for “a public inquiry into his death” after he faced “two weeks of relentless harassment” — despite the fact that the press received “private warnings that their ‘pursuit of Dr. Arday risked his suicide.’” Arday, Bartholomew added, had “been attacked by right-wing outlets, in particular, as a DEI hire.”

The Free Press, Douglas Murray — Murray took issue with any attempt to categorize the hounding of Arday as remotely racist. Instead, he wrote this idea was “manifestly, sinisterly untrue” and pinned the blame for his death not on reporters, but on “the people who elevated him to a position for which he was unsuited.” Yuan Yi Zhu offered a bit of performative kvetching about “the people who had to lose for Arday to win.” And to really drill the outlet’s point home, John McWhorter played the “reverse racism” card and insisted “Arday’s appointment was itself a form of racism — a culture so eager to laud a black academic that it never asked whether his work merited the praise.”

TAKEAWAY: The allegations against Jason Arday were serious and potentially damning, but the assertion that the British media was made aware of the impact their stories had on him and pressed on anyway is a very dark realization in the wake of his death, apparently at his own hand. While some in today’s stack took a measured, respectful approach, others made it clear they were only too eager to join in on the dogpiling. The cases of Amanda Knox and Meghan Markle are reminders the British media in particular has been here before. Whatever Arday did or did not do, say, invent, record, exaggerate, this is an ending that is tragic and unkind.

📰 TOP SCOOPS & ANALYSIS 📰

SCOOP 🍨POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Will Steakin, and Dasha Burns — Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) appears to be “plotting” a launch “for a 2028 presidential bid,” POLITICO reported today. He’s “showering the Democratic Party apparatus with money to the tune of $1 million raised or contributed” and “leveraging his status as an enemy of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with $25 million in the bank to build a wealth of political capital,” two factors that make him an attractive potential candidate. POLITICO spoke to Kelly while he was in Iowa last week, prompting the outlet to ask if there’s any chance voters could expect a Democratic White House bid with Jon Ossoff as his running mate. When asked about a Kelly-Ossoff ticket, Kelly’s response was, “Hey, why’d you put it in that order?”

SCOOP 🍨 Status, Natalie Korach — Hasan Piker and his legal team told Status they are “preparing a defamation suit” against CNN’s Scott Jennings and Salem Media after the MAGA commentator allegedly “stitched together” clips of Piker speaking “from multiple separate streams” and removed “key context” to create “a compilation of clips” as part of an “exploration of the radical socialist streamer.” As Korach noted, “While the clips themselves were authentic, the claim built on top of them was not.” Piker also told Status, “This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable. It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility. I think someone has to push back against it at some point.”

SCOOP 🍨  The Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger— POLITICO might believe Trump “has won on tariffs,” but Egger absolutely declined to agree Monday morning. “The headline alone was fascinating. Until I read it, I personally had been unaware not only how Trump had won on tariffs, but that he had won on them at all,” Egger wrote. Instead, he continued, “I had been laboring under the delusion that Trump’s tariffs were actually treating us pretty badly.” POLITICO’s take is “just grade inflation,” Egger added. “In Trump’s gimmicky, art-of-the-deal-addled mind, all this might add up to a “win.” Apparently, there’s even a Politico writer out there who’d agree.” This kind of media-on-media takedown doesn’t necessarily happen frequently in the stack, and it’s a bit of a marvel to behold.

ANALYSIS 👀 The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — The National Association of Black Journalists gave commentator Stephen A. Smith a thumbs-down for establishing “a recurring public pattern of disparaging commentary directed at prominent Black women across politics, sports and media” at its annual convention this weekend. Smith notably criticized Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), which drew the ire of Joy Reid. The NABJ also “cited concerns about press freedom, newsroom diversity, and the treatment of Black journalists in naming the other recipients.”

ANALYSIS 👀 Punchbowl News AM, John Bresnahan and Briana Reilly— The 2026 campaign trail is shaping up to be a showdown between “crooks and commies,” Bresnahan and Reilly wrote today. That’s a take based on a Meet the Press interview with House Minority Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday. Jeffries “once again predicted that House Democrats will win in November” and that he would “welcome individual DSA members into his caucus.” Punchbowl noted, “Jeffries can’t become speaker without them, so he’ll need to find some accommodation with that bloc.”

ANALYSIS 👀 CJR’s The Media Today, Jem Bartholomew— Bartholomew devoted much of today’s newsletter to the impending exit of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who nearly immediately demonstrated she’s “quick-thinking, combative, and a native speaker of Trump’s language of hyperbole and grievance,” when she took on the role in January 2025. Like many, Bartholomew agrees replacing Leavitt will be a tough challenge. “What Leavitt seemed to understand better than many of her predecessors was that, inside the MAGA court, the goal of press relations is to put on a good show,” Bartholomew wrote. And while there’s a lot to pick apart when it comes to Leavitt, what is “most troubling about Leavitt’s tenure is how she and the wider Trump administration seemed to conceptualize the role of their press relations team.”

📈BUSINESS OF MEDIA 🎥

Poynter, Tom Jones — The Financial Times stuck a note to a column by Harvard professor Ricardo Hausmann, admitting that AI was used to condense a longer draft before submission. While a lot of newsrooms restrict AI in published work but allow it for tasks like transcription and research, the FT‘s editorial code is much stricter: it outright prohibits AI use in any part of the writing process, which the note makes clear. Max Tani of Semafor reported that social media users were the ones who noticed the AI syntax, triggering the disclosure. QUOTE 📣  “It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement. The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process.”

Semafor, Max Tani — New York Magazine will not be publishing more columns by longtime political writer Ross Barkan after an internal review of nearly 250 pieces ended up requiring 67 additional citations that Barkan initially failed to append. Barkan expressed regret for the lapses and pointed to the high volume of work he produced, specifically referencing that 250 number. QUOTE 📣 “There were times I should have been more careful with citation. I’m sorry about these errors and will work to do better, more careful work in the future.”

Punchbowl News, Jake Sherman — House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is seriously hitting the midterm campaign trail in Wisconsin and Michigan, framing the upcoming election as a direct choice between what Punchbowl describes as “Soviet-style socialism” and free-market capitalism. Campaigning for Michael Alfonso, Scalise and Speaker Mike Johnson are trying to link mainstream Democrats to progressive figures like Abdul El-Sayed and Mayor Zohran Mamdani. QUOTE 📣 “If we all stay home, guess what happens? The socialists win. The socialists are on the ballot this November. Make no mistake about it.”

Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter, Simon Owens — The divorce of a married couple who launched a hit podcast together has triggered an interesting industry chat. With both hosts now recording their own solo episodes separately, a Bloomberg analysis of the show’s YouTube metrics revealed that co-hosted episodes reliably received more views than solo-hosted ones, which tend to fluctuate wildly based on the popularity of the guest. QUOTE 📣 ”This is kind of interesting…”

Morning Brew, Matty Merritt — Investors have filed a fraud lawsuit against Selena Gomez and her mental health startup, Wondermind. The lawsuit alleges the founders never delivered on promises of an app, rapid growth, or use of Gomez’s massive social media audience — and you may recall that about a year ago, there was a flurry of reporting that Gomez wasn’t even really very involved at all. A lawyer for the singer dismissed the suit as “meritless.” QUOTE 📣 “Gomez purported to sign a contract obligating her to perform and then ignored it.”

Semafor, Max Tani — Semafor bundled up a few newsy tidbits about Alex Cooper. First, her podcast empire, Unwell, received an investment valuing the network at $500 million. Amid the massive valuation, Cooper is leaving her longtime representation at United Talent Agency to join rival Creative Artists Agency, and has shut down her drinks business. (One Sheet producer Lindsey is somewhat sad to hear this, as she found the cherry-lime energy drink offering tolerable.)

OTHER COOL STUFF

Morning Brew: An 8-year-old boy fishing at a lake near Philly caught a real-life piranha. Local wildlife officials suspect that someone had previously kept the predatory fish as a pet before illegally releasing it into the lake, but we don’t know if that is more or less comforting.

POLITICO Playbook: A software engineer’s simple, pure love of fruit recently sparked a massive gathering in Washington, D.C., where about 1,000 people showed up at a local park to eat an apple together. Organized by Carl Endrulat as “an exercise in silly joy,” the quirky event had absolutely no deeper meaning. We assume there were no doctors present, for obvious reasons.

👀 WHAT GOT MISSED? 👀

POLITICO Playbook, Adam Wren, Will Steakin, and Dasha Burns —Nancy Pelosi “may be leaving the halls of Congress behind, but her former staffers are sticking around in top jobs,”  POLITICO’s Riley Rogerson reported. As Wren, Steakin, and Burns noted, that means “Pelosi alums can be found in the offices of Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries” — something that promises “a piece of Pelosi’s presence will be felt even as Democratic governance enters a new era without her.”r

🏆 NEWSLETTER OF THE DAY 🏆

The Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger — Though Kristol and Egger will undoubtedly have another good newsletter this week, Monday morning’s is a true banger. In addition to Egger’s searing takedown of POLITICO’s reporting on Trump’s tariffs, the duo elevated headlines about Trump’s decision to gut “the U.S.–South Korean maneuvers,” his failures in terms of “negotiations” in Ukraine and Iran, and Attorney General Todd Blanche’s stunning refusal to promise his DOJ will be independent of the president.

They also took a look at Trump’s recent post on Truth Social that offers praise for North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and the pair’s apparent “very good relationship.” They wrote, “There are so many things that are stupid or wrong about this post” — including that “Trump habitually fails to distinguish between his own personal interests and those of the country.” For a pair who rarely fire off a miss, today’s newsletter is a true winner.

This newsletter was produced by Lindsey Ellefson.