Ben Ryan on Controversial Journalism and Jason Arday

This week, my guest is what might be called an ideal Quillette thinker.

And by that I mean someone who started out on one side of the left-right culture war, got exasperated by all the intellectual dishonesty he saw within his or her ideological tribe, and then drifted more toward centrist classical liberalism, all the while taking a scientifically rigorous approach to each issue.

This anti-tribal approach to policy and politics can be a lonely affair. But as the success of the Quillette project shows, there’s a fair number of us. 

My guest, Benjamin Ryan—I’ll be calling him Ben—started out professional life as a New York City journalist writing about HIV and AIDS in the 2000s. Some of his early scoops came at the expense of conservative Republicans, who stood in the way of new funding for AIDS research and treatment.

But as the years went on, Ben grew frustrated with some of the ideologically imposed no-go zones he observed among activists and colleagues, some of whom discouraged him from reporting facts that they saw as inconvenient to their cause.

He then observed a similar pattern years later, when it came to coverage of monkeypox, and of issues related to gender dysphoria and transgender rights. 

More recently, he’s been reporting on the scandal involving Jason Arday, the 41-year-old Cambridge professor who committed suicide following media-reported revelations that much of his academic work was plagiarized or fraudulent, and that his life story was a series of lies, many of them apparently based on the plot lines of soap operas and other TV shows.

No, the Media Isn’t Responsible for Jason Arday’s Suicide

The disgraced academic was a pathological liar and lifelong con artist whose misdeeds were covered up for years by self-serving academic administrators. Exposing this kind of rot in elite institutions is our job.

These are spicy topics to be sure. But as we’ll hear, Ben Ryan isn’t one to shy away from a good story.