Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng defended the publication’s reporting on scholar Neri Oxman on Sunday, describing the process taken to report the stories as “sound” and that Oxman was a “fair subject.”
“The process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound, as was the timing. Through their representative, Oxman and Ackman responded that they had made the decision not to comment,” Peng wrote in a note on Business Insider’s website, which was also shared with staffers in an email. “The stories are accurate and the facts well documented.”
A spokesperson for Business Insider did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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The note came a week after Axel Springer, the German publishing empire that owns Business Insider, ordered a review of the inception process for the stories that alleged Oxman plagiarized elements of some of her scholarly papers. It came in response to thousands of words of criticism from billionaire Bill Ackman, Oxman’s husband and the mogul who partially led the crusade to oust Harvard President Claudine Gray over plagiarism allegations.
Ackman did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
The stories highlighted elements from Oxman’s doctoral dissertation in 2010 that it alleged she lifted from other writers (and, in some cases, Wikipedia) without citation. Oxman acknowledged her errors in a post on X and said she would work with the Massachusetts Institute for Technology to correct the mistakes.
But Ackman escalated the fight through his X account, appealing directly to Axel Springer executives along with KKR, its primary shareholder. Ackman’s criticisms included Business Insider’s journalistic practices, Axel Springer’s management of it, and insinuations that an editor he accused of being an anti-Zionist targeted his wife because she was Israeli—despite no evidence to back such claims. Axel Springer announced its review on Jan. 7, prompting frustration among Business Insider reporters and editors.
That review appeared to conclude on Sunday.
“Business Insider supports and empowers our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we do so with editorial independence,” Peng wrote in the note. “We stand by our newsroom and our reporting, which will continue onward.”
