Business Insider and its parent company, Axel Springer, said Sunday that they stood by the outlet’s reporting that Neri Oxman, a prominent former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, had plagiarized in her doctoral dissertation.
In a note Sunday morning, Barbara Peng, chief executive of Business Insider, said the outlet had spent several days reviewing its reporting after public complaints made by Ackman. The review, Peng said, found that “there was no unfair bias” and that the “process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound.”
Peng said a pair of stories the outlet published earlier this month reporting that Oxman had plagiarized other scholars’ work and lifted more than a dozen sections from Wikipedia “are accurate.” She described Oxman as a “fair subject” and “has a public profile as a prominent intellectual and has been a subject of and participant in media coverage,” rebutting Ackman’s complaints that she should have been immune to coverage tied to Ackman’s recent activism.
“Business Insider supports and empowers our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we do so with editorial independence,” Peng wrote. “We stand by our newsroom and our reporting, which will continue onward.”
In the wake of the reporting, Oxman acknowledged she had failed to properly cite some of her work. “I regret and apologize for these errors,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. Ackman has since disputed the veracity of Business Insider’s reporting and said Oxman has hired an attorney. Representatives for Oxman and Ackman could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.
Business Insider announced last week that Axel Springer had compelled a review of its reporting alleging that Oxman had plagiarized her work, eliciting questions and criticism of the parent company’s decision.
The stories had been published after Ackman helped spearhead a campaign to oust Claudine Gay as Harvard University’s president. Ackman applied relentless pressure on Harvard to remove Gay, initially criticizing the academic for the school’s response to anti-Semitism and then later for plagiarism, the latter of which ultimately led to her removal.
A spokesperson for Axel Springer told CNN on Sunday that the German publishing powerhouse was satisfied with the review Business Insider had completed.
“We stand by Business Insider and its newsroom,” the spokesperson said.
The days-long review had alarmed staffers at Business Insider, who were troubled about the precedent such a review might set, particularly on a punchy newsroom known for aggressively reporting on the wealthy and powerful. One staffer told CNN earlier this week that journalists at the outlet were perturbed about “the chilling effect” that Axel Springer’s move could have on the organization.
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