Business Insider’s top executive and parent company said Sunday they were satisfied with the fairness and accuracy of stories that made plagiarism accusations against a former MIT professor who’s married to a distinguished critic of former Harvard President Claudine Gay.
“We stand by Business Insider and its newsroom,” said a spokesman for Axel Springer, the German media company that owns the publication.
The corporate had said it could look into the stories about Neri Oxman, a distinguished designer, following complaints by her husband, Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate and CEO of the Pershing Square investment firm.
He publicly campaigned against Gay, who resigned earlier this month following criticism of her answers at a congressional hearing on antisemitism and charges that her academic writing contained examples of improperly credited work.
With its stories, Business Insider raised each the concept of hypocrisy and the chance that academic dishonesty is widespread, even among the many nation’s most distinguished scholars.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman questioned Business Insider’s motives for publishing an investigation that claimed his wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized dozens of times in her 2010 PhD dissertation. REUTERS
Ackman said his wife, Neri Oxman, admitted to 4 missing quotation marks and one missed footnote in a 330-page dissertation. Getty Images
Ackman’s response, and the pressure that a well-connected person placed on the company owners of a journalism outlet, raised questions on the outlet’s independence.
Business Insider and Axel Springer’s “liability just goes up and up and up,” Ackman said Sunday in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “That is what they consider fair, accurate and well-documented reporting with appropriate timing. Incredible.”
Business Insider’s first article, on Jan. 4, noted that Ackman had seized on revelations about Gay’s work to back his efforts against her — but that the organization’s journalists “found the same pattern of plagiarism” by Oxman.
A second piece, published the following day, said Oxman had stolen sentences and paragraphs from Wikipedia, fellow scholars and technical documents in a 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT.
Axel Springer launched a probe into Business Insider’s stories after complaints by Ackman. EPA
Ackman complained that it was a low blow to attack someone’s family in such a way and said Business Insider reporters gave him lower than two hours to reply to the accusations.
He suggested an editor there was an anti-Zionist. Oxman was born in Israel.
The business leader reached out in protest to board members at each Business Insider and Axel Springer.
That led to Axel Springer telling The Latest York Times that questions had been raised concerning the motivation behind the articles and the reporting process, and the corporate promised to conduct a review.
On Sunday, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng issued a press release saying “there was no unfair bias or personal, political and/or religious motivation in pursuit of the story.”
Peng said the stories were newsworthy and that Oxman, with a public profile as a distinguished mental, was fair game as a subject.
The stories were “accurate and the facts well-documented,” Peng said.
Claudine Gay resigned earlier this month following criticism of her answers at a congressional hearing on antisemitism and claims of plagiarism. David McGlynn
“Business Insider supports and empowers our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we achieve this with editorial independence,” Peng wrote.
Business Insider wouldn’t say who conducted the review of its work.
Ackman said his wife admitted to 4 missing quotation marks and one missed footnote in a 330-page dissertation.
He said the articles could have “literally killed” his wife if not for the support of her family and friends.
“She has suffered severe emotional harm,” he wrote on X, “and as an introvert, it has been very, very difficult for her to make it through every day.”
For her part, Gay wrote within the Times that those that campaigned to have her ousted “often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned arguments.”
Harvard’s first Black president said she was the topic of death threats and had “been called the N-word more times than I care to count.”
There was no immediate comment Sunday from Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider’s global editor in chief.
In a memo to his staff last weekend that was reported by The Washington Post, Carlson said he made the decision to publish each of the stories and that he knew the technique of preparing them was sound.
