Beware the cops who tell reporters its a crime to ask questions

Jason Arday has quit his Cambridge professorship, but the affair of the fabulist academic won’t be over until many questions are answered — including how British cops came to treat Journalism 101 as a crime.The Metropolitan Police spent months investigating reporter Jack Grove after he emailed questions to the prof.Yes, long before the plagiarism allegations and other issues went public, Grove was working on a story for Times Higher Education about the academic record of Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor.Questions that the authorities somehow determined to be racially motivated harassment, even telling Grove to stop contacting Arday because the questions had impacted the professor’s “mental health.”But they didn’t tell the reporter he was actually under investigation until they called him recently to say the case had been closed.This was far from the only intimidation on Arday’s behalf: The school hired high-powered attorneys to threaten other academics who flagged his apparent plagiarism; media around the world implied the critics were simply racists.Yes, the all-out defense eventually became untenable after three universities denied Arday’s claims about his affiliations with them.But the cops’ squelching of Grove might have quashed the whole thing — and who knows what other British journalism has been suppressed?Don’t think it couldn’t happen here in America, either, if not in exactly the same way: Uncle Sam himself did engage in all manner of truth-suppression in the pandemic years, just for starters.Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more.

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Never miss a story.Letting any government official claim the power to tell anyone to stop asking questions is a giant step toward tyranny....