Media releases written by politicians' staff are being copy-pasted into some regional newspapers and presented as news stories.
Several Victorian regional newspapers have featured stories over the past month that appear mostly or entirely copied from media releases.
Journalism academics have warned that the lack of scrutiny is "hugely problematic for democracy", especially ahead of this year's federal election.
Most news organisations, including the ABC, receive media releases every day and publish information they contain.
But journalists' codes of ethics say reporters should aim to attribute information to its source and disclose any conflicts of interest that could undermine the independence of the reporting.
Associate professor Alex Wake is president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia.
She said readers can be misled when journalists fail to apply proper scrutiny to information provided by interested parties.
"Without a journalist ... asking questions and investigating what's going on, we can just be fed lies," she said.
"Where there aren't local news journalists actually questioning what's going on it's hugely problematic for democracy."
'They should be 'fessing up'
Andrew Dodd, director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at University of Melbourne, said newspapers that print media releases verbatim should disclose that to readers.
"The very least these publications should be doing is disclosing that it's happening," he said.
He said if journalists don't apply scepticism to what politicians say in the form of media releases, "the audience is getting information that looks like news but is in fact public relations".
COVID hit regional newspapers hard
Media-release journalism is not a new phenomenon in regional Australia.
A 2008 Deakin University study of 14 regional newspapers found their reporters were "not adequately verifying information supplied in media releases and using a significant amount of this information verbatim".
But the pandemic has accelerated a long-term decline in advertising revenue across the global newspaper industry, hitting regional newsrooms particularly hard.
Mildura paper the Sunraysia Daily had to stand down staff in 2020 but has since reopened.
That year, staff were also stood down at the free weekly Sunraysia Life, which is no longer in publication, the Swan Hill Guardian and the Gannawarra Times at Kerang.
According to the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, 60 regional Australia newspapers have folded since the pandemic began.
Dr Wake warned that although it was nothing new, media-release journalism was likely to become more common, with fewer journalists in regional newsrooms.
'Nothing to challenge'
Editor of the Mildura Weekly, John Dooley, said the main purpose of his newspaper was to present local community news.
He said it's not really there to parse controversial public debates.
But he said more press releases had been included in the paper recently because of the local news "drought" caused by COVID-19 event cancellations.
Mr Dooley said the vast majority of the political releases he uses are about local funding announcements, which he took "on face value".
"I think the releases should always be scrutinised and not always reproduced verbatim," he said.
"Sometimes you'll get a release, and you'll do a follow up to it or you'll do an interview in relation to it and so on; not to question it, but to enhance it.
"But generally speaking, I take releases on face value.
"If one was to follow up and question, and in a sense create another story from that release you wouldn't have the resources to do it anyway."
'Important that politicians have a voice'
Nationals MP Anne Webster is the chair of federal parliament's inquiry into Australia's regional news services.
She is also one of the regional MPs whose media releases have appeared, copy-pasted, in newspapers in her electorate.
Dr Webster said she prefers it when journalists ask questions after her office sends out a media release, but she understands the workforce pressures newsrooms are under.
"My preference is that journalists do ring up and ask questions — I think it's really good for me [and] it's really good for the community.
"I don't think that simply cutting and pasting is necessarily the best way to go, but I certainly understand time constraints and limited workforce.
Dr Webster pointed out that she had no control over whether one of her media releases ends up copy-pasted into a newspaper.
She said it was important that news was as accurate as possible, and that local MPs can "have a voice" in their communities.
"If the community is benefiting from the work that a politician is doing, the community needs to know that," she said.
"That is helpful for the politician, of course, but it's important that the work that is done the community knows about.
"Otherwise, the community can feel like the politician is doing nothing."
