In 2021, a former student of University of Cambridge history professor William O’Reilly accused him of plagiarism. The student noticed his prose comprised nearly half of O’Reilly’s article in the Journal of Austrian-American History published in 2018.
O’Reilly claimed he “accidentally” copied around 4,000 words from two essays by this student without any citation.
In 2023, a university tribunal found O’Reilly had plagiarized his former student. The journal retracted the article, stating its information “was presented without credit.” But the university tribunal seemingly believed O’Reilly’s explanation.
It ruled the plagiarism was “the product of negligent acts but was not deliberate.” O’Reilly was “baffled” at the conclusion.
The Financial Times was the only major news outlet to cover O’Reilly’s case. According to NewsCord, a UK media watchdog, the UK media published 249 articles in 22 days on Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism by a racist propagandist. After three weeks of unremitting media coverage, Arday died on Friday.
Arday was Black. O’Reilly is White.
The Howard University Institute for Advanced Study investigated U.S. media coverage of Arday and O’Reilly. We selected 15 mainstream media outlets with a large and influential reach and across the ideological aisle: MSNOW, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, Associated Press, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Fox News, CBS News, NBC News, and the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
We searched closed-caption transcripts of broadcast clips via the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive. For each of the fifteen outlets, we also used Google to perform site searches for “Jason Arday” in the past year up until Tuesday at 9 a.m. and for “William O’Reilly” since January 2018. For any sites where the search turned up no results, we searched directly on the outlet’s websites and YouTube.
We found that 15 U.S. media outlets published at least 30 pieces about Arday in the 12 days before his death. The outlets publishing the most pieces were the New York Post (7), the Wall Street Journal (5), and the New York Times (4).
We could not find any coverage of O’Reilly in any of these outlets.
No stories about any of the allegations against him from the past few years.
No mention of him or his case in any coverage of Arday from those 15 outlets.
We reached out to the outlets that published the most stories about Arday, but have not yet received a response.
What makes these findings chilling is that O’Reilly’s case is much more serious than Arday’s. The U.S. and UK media coverage was hardly proportionate to the seriousness of the allegations against these two Cambridge professors.
Arday was accused of falsifying details from his life story and plagiarizing journal articles and his doctoral thesis. The institution where Arday obtained his PhD, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), investigated his thesis and some journal articles for plagiarism. The university concluded he had not plagiarized and similarities to other academic works were likely caused by “honest and reasonable error.” Last week, Cambridge announced an investigation into Arday’s work and appointment.
In O’Reilly’s case, a professor plagiarizing a student’s paper from a class signifies two serious acts of misconduct: plagiarism and an abuse of power. Professors can more easily cover up plagiarizing an unpublished student paper than the published paper of a fellow scholar. With the professor and the student the only two who usually have access to student papers for classes, it often falls on the relatively powerless student to find, report, and prove the plagiarism of their professor, putting their career at risk.
The student whose essays O’Reilly plagiarized told Cambridge’s student newspaper, Varsity: “I spent over two years going through the University’s complaints process, and despite my complaint being upheld, they have refused to explain how they reached the conclusion of accidental plagiarism.”
The fifteen U.S. media outlets we investigated did not cover this story.
O’Reilly was accused again of plagiarism in 2024. He was accused of lifting sizeable amounts of material without crediting sources in three journal articles between 2006 and 2016. He told Varsity that he “never consciously sought to represent the work of others as mine.”
It’s unclear whether the University of Cambridge investigated these allegations. The fifteen U.S. media outlets we investigated did not report these new allegations.
In 2018, O’Reilly was in charge of student welfare at Trinity Hall, a college within Cambridge. When a male student was accused of sexual assault, O’Reilly named a panel to investigate, then testified on behalf of the student, whom he knew personally. The student was cleared.
In 2020, when Tortoise, a news website, broke the news, more than 220 students signed a letter calling on the history faculty to investigate O’Reilly’s actions. Students were especially furious that O’Reilly was allowed to be in charge of the sexual assault investigation even though he himself had been accused of sexual assault. He has denied those allegations, and the Financial Times reported that this “led to no further action being taken against him.”
The Emancipator reached out to the University of Cambridge for a response.
None of the fifteen U.S. media outlets published any stories or op-eds about O’Reilly amid this major sexual assault scandal at Cambridge.
In addition to the 30 pieces in the two weeks before Arday’s death, these same 15 U.S. media outlets published 35 pieces between his death on Aug. 14 and the morning of Aug. 18. The majority of these pieces covered his death, vigils, and official reactions.
But several of them continued the media’s pile-on.
The pile-on after Arday’s passing primarily came from those outlets – the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times – that had published the most stories before his death.
On Aug. 15, The New York Times published, “Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring” with five reporters having a byline for this story.
The Atlantic piled on with “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday” on August 15 and “Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion” on Tuesday.
On Aug. 17, the New York Post published, “DEI made Jason Arday’s career — and its cult of woke killed him.”
In total, we found that the 15 U.S. media outlets published a total of at least 65 pieces about Arday between Aug. 3 and 9 a.m. on Aug. 18. Again, we found zero pieces in these U.S. outlets on his former colleague, William O’Reilly, who remains a professor at Cambridge.
Ella Wagner contributed to the research study.
