Business Insider owner Axel Springer said it stands by the publication after reviewing the reporting process behind stories that alleged plagiarism by Neri Oxman, the designer and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is married to hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.
The German media company said last week it would review the process and motivations behind the recent BI articles. The review came amid complaints from Ackman, in a series of posts on X, about the publication’s reporting tactics.
Ackman’s concerns included the notion that anti-Zionism was at play in the reporting process, which people at Business Insider rejected.
“We stand by Business Insider and its newsroom,” Axel Springer said in a statement.
“There was no unfair bias or personal, political, and/or religious motivation in the pursuit of the stories,” Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng said in an internal memo. “The stories were newsworthy and Neri Oxman, who has a public profile as a prominent intellectual and has been a subject of and participant in media coverage, is a fair subject.”
Oxman, who is Israeli, was a professor at MIT’s Media Lab for about a decade. BI’s reporting on her began with a story 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 went deeper, claiming that Oxman had lifted several passages from Wikipedia in her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation, without citation.
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 his 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.
“Business Insider’s and [Axel Springer’s] liability just goes up and up and up,” Ackman posted on X in response to Axel Springer’s statement defending the publication and its reporting. “This is what they consider fair, sound, accurate and well documented reporting with appropriate timing.”
In a post last week that recounts his communication with leadership at Axel Springer, he made several demands, including that the publication remove stories alleging plagiarism by his wife, create a settlement fund “to compensate all those who have been victimized by BI,” and severely punish those responsible for the reporting.
“The process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound, as was the timing,” Peng said in the memo. “The stories are accurate and the facts well documented.”
Axel Springer’s review had dismayed BI staffers, from senior editors to rank-and-file journalists, who thought the parent company shouldn’t have gotten involved, the Journal previously reported.
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com