The Courier-Mail columnist and Sky News host Peter Gleeson has been caught out plagiarising for the third time this month, filling almost half his column with the unattributed reporting of a regional ABC journalist.
The plagiarism was identified by Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission (AFMRC), who have been trawling through Gleeson’s work since he was caught out twice this month for similar offences – including by Guardian Australia, which revealed he filled 62% of an article with copy from a Queensland parliament factsheet.
In the latest example, discovered in a “Gleeso Confidential” column from March, the former editor of the Sunday Mail told the moving story of Chinchilla woman Yvette Bracefield, who was “forced to give birth on the side of a regional highway”.
Titled Oh Baby, the Bush Still Gets Raw Deal, the column began by trumpeting a 2017 Sunday Mail series about “the inequity between health services provided to women in the bush, compared with those in the southeast corner”.
“It was confronting stuff, particularly for those women simply wanting to have a baby in a regional city or town,” Gleeson continued. “The State Government pledged to fix it.”
The next eight paragraphs, however, did not cite his paper’s past work. Instead, they reported Bracefield’s recent ordeal in vivid detail.
“We caught Beatrix at the time … but I kept having nightmares that we weren’t going to catch her in time and she was just going to go splat on the asphalt,” she says of her newborn’s traumatic arrival into the world.
The quote, like the next eight paragraphs, was lifted from a story by ABC Southern Queensland reporter Jon Daly published in February. The original reporting, though, was not mentioned.
After a paragraph in which Gleeson derides a hospital spokesperson’s response in Daly’s reporting as “tepid” and “stupid”, the columnist then returns to use the ABC story for another three paragraphs.
Afterwards Gleeson switches to rural banks closing and quotes Robbie Katter. In all, about 45% of the article is taken, without attribution, from the ABC article.
In response to questions from Guardian Australia, a News Corp spokesperson said the organisation would review the matter as part of “ongoing inquiries”.
“We are aware of the new claims regarding Peter Gleeson and have included them into our ongoing inquiries,” the spokesperson said.
Gleeson has been contacted for comment.
AFMRC’s national director, Kirsti Gorringe, said she expected more plagiarism to emerge as her organisation sifts through Gleeson’s past work.
“Peter Gleeson is one of Australia’s nastiest critics of the ABC, claiming regional Australia is ‘fed up’ with the national broadcaster,” she wrote in a draft email to supporters seen by the Guardian.
“But he’s secretly a huge fan of the ABC, repeatedly ripping off the ABC’s reporting as his own!
“To make matters worse, this news report was about Dalby and Chinchilla – two regional centres where the Murdochs were allowed to buy the local newspapers. They made big promises to invest in local news, then ruthlessly shut them down and replaced them with the Courier-Mail and Sky News.”
The first of Gleeson’s plagiarism cases to emerge was from a 12-page “Special Investigation by Peter Gleeson” headlined “Power and Palaszczuk”. A hit job on the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, it included four paragraphs lifted from the political analysis of the ABC Brisbane reporter Josh Bavas.
After Bavas posted his article side-by-side on Twitter with Gleeson’s article, Courier-Mail staff demanded to know what their editor, Chris Jones, was going to do about the plagiarism.
Jones told them he was taking it seriously and posted an uncharacteristically frank note for a News Corp editor on the offending online article, condemning plagiarism as theft. The Courier-Mail also published a page-four apology from Gleeson in which he claimed the plagiarism was “unintentional”.
Gleeson has not published any reports since the Guardian revealed his plagiarism earlier this month.
Gorringe said AFMRC would continue to see if it could find more examples. If it did, it planned to take it to government and argue for a royal commission to bring about “real systemic change” and “media reform”.
In the meantime, she said News Corp should be looking at its entire organisation, “not just Peter and not just the Courier Mail”.
