NEW YORK — Business Insider’s CEO and parent company said Sunday they were satisfied with the fairness and accuracy of the stories alleging plagiarism against a former MIT professor married to a prominent critic of former Harvard President Claudine Gay .
“We stand behind Business Insider and its newsroom,” said a spokesperson for Axel Springer, the German media company that owns the publication.
The company had said it would investigate the stories about Neri Oxman, a prominent designer, following complaints from her husband, Bill Ackman, a Harvard graduate and CEO of the investment firm Pershing Square. He publicly campaigned against Gay, who resigned earlier this month after criticism of her answers at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism and accusations that her academic writings contained examples of falsely credited work.
With its stories, Business Insider raised both the idea of hypocrisy and the possibility that academic dishonesty is widespread, even among the nation’s most prominent scientists.
Ackman’s response, and the pressure a well-connected individual put on the business owners of a journalistic outlet, raised questions about the outlet’s independence.
Business Insider and Axel Springer’s liability “continues to increase,” Ackman said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday. “This is what they consider fair, accurate and well-documented reporting with appropriate timing. Unbelievable.”
Business Insider’s first article, on January 4, noted that Ackman had used the revelations about Gay’s work to bolster his efforts against her — but that the organization’s journalists “found a similar pattern of plagiarism” with Oxman. A second piece, published in the next article. said Oxman stole sentences and paragraphs from Wikipedia, fellow scientists and technical papers in a 2010 dissertation at MIT
Ackman complained that it was a low blow to attack someone’s family in such a way and said Business Insider reporters gave him less than two hours to respond to the allegations. He suggested that there was an editor, there was an anti-Zionist. Oxman was born in Israel.
The company director contacted board members of both Business Insider and Axel Springer in protest. That led to Axel Springer telling The New York Times that questions had been raised about the motivation behind the articles and the reporting process, and that the company promised to conduct an investigation.
On Sunday, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng issued a statement saying, “There was no unfair bias or personal, political and/or religious motivation in pursuing the story.”
Peng said the stories were newsworthy and that Oxman, with a public profile as a leading intellectual, was fair game as a subject. The stories were “accurate and the facts well documented,” Peng said.
“Business Insider supports and enables our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we do this with editorial independence,” Peng wrote.
Business Insider would not say who conducted the review of his work.
Ackman said his wife admitted to four missing quotes and one footnote in a 330-page dissertation. He said the articles could have “literally killed” his wife if she had not had the support of her family and friends.
“She suffered serious emotional damage,” he wrote on X, “and as an introvert it was very, very difficult for her to get through every day.”
For her part, Gay wrote in the Times that those campaigning to have her ousted “often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned arguments.” Harvard’s first black president said she was the subject of death threats and “called the N-word more times than I care to count.”
There was no immediate comment Sunday from Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider’s editor-in-chief. In a memo to his staff last weekend, reported by The Washington Post, Carlson said he had made the call to publish both stories and that he knew the preparation process was right.