Since acquiring Business Insider nine years ago, Axel Springer has largely steered clear of intervening in the news outlet’s editorial operations, even when high-profile people objected to unflattering articles about them.
That hasn’t been the case in recent days.
The German media giant said it is reviewing the process and motivations behind a recent BI article accusing the designer and former professor Neri Oxman of plagiarism. The review comes amid complaints from Oxman’s husband, the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, about the publication’s reporting tactics.
Ackman has registered his concerns in a flurry of X posts and said he texted with a BI director, urging the company to retract the article pending a probe. “Every minute more damage is created,” Ackman wrote to the director. Axel Springer was particularly concerned about Ackman’s suggestion that anti-Zionism was at play in the reporting process, a notion BI insiders reject.
The article wasn’t taken down, but Axel Springer’s review has dismayed BI staffers, from senior editors to rank-and-file journalists, who think the parent company shouldn’t have gotten involved, say people familiar with the situation.
BI editor in chief Nicholas Carlson has defended the publication’s work, and late Monday, the outlet’s union issued a statement saying, “We are disappointed to see Axel Springer publicly call the integrity of its journalists into question,” adding, “we stand behind our members’ work.”
Representatives for Ackman and Oxman had no comment.
The review and frustrations inside BI are a test for Axel Springer, owner of such German titles as Bild and Die Welt, as it raises its profile in the U.S. The company, led by CEO Mathias Döpfner, added Politico to its fold in 2021 and has said it would be open to further expansion.
Axel Springer acquired Business Insider in 2015, seeing a web-savvy outfit that was drawing audiences to business reporting with punchy headlines, pithy news summaries and a healthy share of scoops and investigations. BI’s strategy evolved over the years, as it emphasized paid subscriptions to varying degrees over time.
Getting into scrapes with public figures isn’t new for BI. Last year, the founder of sports and pop culture site Barstool, Dave Portnoy, filed a defamation lawsuit against BI in response to sexual-misconduct allegations it published. The suit by Portnoy, who denied the allegations, was ultimately dismissed.
BI’s reporting on Oxman began with a story last week that said she didn’t use quotation marks when quoting another work in several instances, and paraphrased from a book without a citation. Oxman apologized for those occurrences in a post on X.
A follow-up BI story Friday evening went deeper, claiming that Oxman had lifted several passages from Wikipedia in her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation, without citation. Oxman, who is Israeli, was a professor at MIT’s Media Lab for about a decade.
In his posts on X, Ackman said the BI reporting was in retaliation for his role in generating a wave of scrutiny of Harvard University and its leadership. Ackman was one of the earliest critics of how Harvard University’s leadership handled students’ response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and allegations of plagiarism against Claudine Gay, who resigned as the university’s president earlier this month.
Ackman said BI gave hiss communications representative less than two hours to provide a comment for the follow-up article after sending an email with detailed examples of alleged plagiarism by Oxman.
What drew particular concern from top executives at Axel Springer was Ackman’s speculation about BI’s motives, a person familiar with the situation said. “Note that they chose to send the email after sundown on Friday night to a family that celebrates Shabbat dinner together. And also note that they are attacking the Israeli wife of the protagonist in this situation,” Ackman wrote on X.
Axel Springer’s main corporate principles include support for Israel. The company requires its German employees to sign a written commitment to those principles. While U.S. employees aren’t required to sign the pledge, Döpfner told The Wall Street Journal after Axel Springer acquired Politico that he expected its staffers to adhere to the principles, which also include support for a united Europe and a free-market economy.
“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Döpfner said.
On Sunday, Ackman was in contact with a BI director to dispute the BI article and raise his concerns privately. He was told the company had launched an investigation. “The story is the number one trending story on X,” Ackman texted the director, according to a post Tuesday on X in which Ackman detailed the exchange.
On Sunday evening, an Axel Springer spokesman issued a public statement. “Over the past few days questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting — questions that we take very seriously,” he said. “We are going to take a couple of days to review the processes around these stories to ensure that our standards as well as our journalistic values have been upheld. We will be transparent with our conclusions.”
The statement wasn’t well received in the BI newsroom, where reporters in Slack channels complained about the parent company meddling in editorial business.
“I stand proudly by our newsroom and therefore welcome any sort of review of our work as I am confident it will put my colleagues, our readers, and other stakeholders at ease,” Carlson, BI’s editor, wrote in a memo to staff.
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com