In a note published Sunday morning, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng said there were no personal bias or religious motivations that inspired the reporting. The company said last week it would review the reporting process after Ackman criticized the website’s reporting.
“The process we went through to report, edit, and review the stories was sound, as was the timing,” Peng wrote, adding later, “The stories are accurate and the facts well documented.”
“Business Insider supports and empowers our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we do so with editorial independence,” she wrote. “We stand by our newsroom and our reporting, which will continue onward.”
A spokesman for Ackman declined to comment. Ackman himself criticized Business Insider and Axel Springer in multiple social media posts Sunday afternoon.
“Business Insider’s and @axelspringer liability just goes up and up and up,” he wrote. “This is what they consider fair, sound, accurate and well documented reporting with appropriate timing. Incredible.”
On Jan. 5, Business Insider published two stories that alleged Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor, had plagiarized some of her work, including taking information from Wikipedia articles to write her dissertation. The stories came after her husband, the hedge fund manager Ackman, pushed Harvard University to oust its then-president, Claudine Gay, over concerns that she had mishandled student protests and committed plagiarism in her career. Gay resigned from the presidency on Jan. 2.
Ackman was highly critical of Business Insider over the allegation against his wife, challenging the reporters and accusing the writers of unethical journalism. In a social media post on Jan. 7, Ackman said Business Insider’s investigation editor was an anti-Zionist who had targeted Oxman because she was Israeli.
Axel Springer, in response to Ackman’s criticisms, said last week it would conduct an internal review to find out what happened before the Oxman stories were published.
“While the facts of the reports have not been disputed, 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,” the company said in a statement at the time.
Despite the concern over the reporting, Oxman issued an apology on X (formerly Twitter) for not using quotation marks properly. However, she said she properly cited all sources within her work.
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