SPRINGFIELD — Peter Banko, Baystate Health‘s president and CEO, has been accused of plagiarizing other writers in a number of internal blog posts.
“We are aware of a complaint to our compliance hotline in January and May and it is being managed as an internal compliance matter,” said Heather Duggan, a spokesperson for the hospital. “The Baystate Health Board of Trustees has discussed and addressed it with our President & CEO.”
When asked Thursday how the board addressed it, and if Banko was available to speak about it, Duggan declined to comment.
A review of internal blog posts obtained by The Republican shows that items appearing under Banko’s name contain sections that are identical or very similar to other previously published materials, from sources including Wikipedia, Forbes.com, NPR and Harvard Business School’s blog. The original authors are not credited.
The allegations were first reported Thursday morning by The Boston Globe.
“This is not a one-off mistake, this is a pattern of behavior,” said a Baystate Health employee who submitted a complaint to the hospital system. The person did not want to be named for fear it would impact their employment.
Banko writes in a January 2025 post about five Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speeches one should know — the same topic of an NPR article published almost a year earlier.
Not only is Banko’s list of speeches the same as the NPR story, but multiple paragraphs in his post are nearly identical to sections of the NPR article.
Jonathan Eig, author of a biography on King, is quoted in the NPR story commenting on King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop!” speech that he delivered in 1968. “The speech really does feel a bit like his own eulogy,” Eig told NPR. ”He’s talking about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn’t live to see the Promised Land.”
Banko’s post includes nearly the same quote, but he writes it as his own words. “The speech does feel a bit like his own eulogy. He talks about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn’t live to see the Promised Land.”
The same post by Banko contains several other sentences and phrases that are nearly the same as those from another expert source NPR interviewed about an MLK speech.
The blog posts by Banko are for employees and meant to be “digestible, informative, and inspirational,” Duggan said.
“Metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas are referenced to make the content relatable and tangible to the work we are doing right here in Western Massachusetts,” she said of the posts.
Banko has been president and CEO of Baystate since June 2024. He was previously CEO of Centura Health, in Centennial, Colorado, and took the job at Baystate replacing now-retired Dr. Mark Keroack.
In another post, “Over a Bowl of Gumbo,” Banko writes about Leah Chase, known as the “Queen of Creole Cuisine.” One paragraph in his post is, aside from the omission of a phrase, just a few words different from a passage in a Wikipedia article about Chase.
In a post entitled “I want the Truth!” Banko writes about lying.
“When I was growing up, one of the principles in my parent’s house was that we had to tell the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Lying wasn’t something you could get away with (although my sister and I tried). Like Pinocchio’s nose, it would be apparent to others.”
He later wrote: “However as we get older, the truth becomes more nuanced — and there are times when a little white lie or the absence of some key facts might be appropriate. The problem is that all of us have different standards for when, why, and how we shade the truth.”
Those paragraphs are nearly identical to a 2013 blog post from Forbes.com entitled “Why Organizational Truth Has Many Shades of Gray.”
Standards violated
To the employee who reported the suspected plagiarism to the hospital, it wasn’t a gray area.
“It violates the legal, ethical, and professional standards that he himself laid out in our code of conduct,” they wrote in the complaint, which they shared with The Republican. “Simply put, it is terrible leadership. Baystate employees and our patients deserve so much better than this.”
The employee said they were reading a post from late April called “All apologies,” in which Banko talks about a letter an Apple CEO wrote in 2007.
Banko’s post reads: “On September 6, 2007, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to ‘all iPhone customers’ that was published on Apple’s website. It’s no longer available there, but I am sure you can find it through a Google search.”
The employee did their own Google search and found a 2022 opinion article on INC.com. It reads: ” … on September 6, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to ‘all iPhone customers,’ that was published on Apple’s website. (It’s no longer available there, but you can read the entire thing via a copy on the internet archive.)”
The INC.com story says of the letter: “the entire thing is a masterclass in admitting when you’re wrong.” Banko writes that: “The entire thing is a masterclass in admitting when you are wrong.”
