After review, Business Insider stands by report on ex-Harvard president’s critic’s wife

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NEW YORK (AP) — Business Insider’s top executive and parent company said Sunday they are satisfied with the fairness and accuracy of stories that have leveled allegations of plagiarism against a former MIT professor who is married to former Harvard President Claudine. Gay is a prominent critic.

“We stand with Business Insider and its newsroom,” said a spokesman for Axel Springer, the German media company that owns the publication.

The company had said it would look into their stories after complaints from Neri Oxman, a prominent designer, her husband, a Harvard graduate, and Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square investment firm. He publicly campaigned against gays, who resigned His answers at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism earlier this month were criticized and alleged to be examples of improperly credited work in his academic writing.

With its stories, Business Insider raised both the idea of ​​hypocrisy and the possibility that academic dishonesty is widespread, even among the country’s most prominent scholars.

Ackman’s response, and the pressure exerted by a well-connected individual on the corporate owners of a journalism outlet, raised questions about the outlet’s independence.

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Business Insider and Axel Springer’s “liability continues to grow,” Ackman said Sunday. in a post On X, formerly on Twitter. “This is what they consider to be unbiased, accurate and well-documented reporting in a timely manner. Incredible.”

Business Insider’s first articleOn January 4, it was noted that Oxman had made revelations about Gay’s work to support his efforts against Gay – but the organization’s journalists “found a similar pattern of plagiarism” by Oxman. second piecePublished the next day, it said that Ekman had stolen sentences and paragraphs from Wikipedia, fellow scholars, and technical documents in his 2010 doctoral dissertation at MIT.

Ackman complained that attacking one’s family in this manner was a low blow and said that Business Insider reporters gave him less than two hours to respond to the allegations. He suggested that an editor there was anti-Semitic. Oxman was born in Israel.

Business leaders reached out to board members of both Business Insider and Axel Springer in protest. This led Axel Springer to tell The New York Times that questions were raised about the motivations behind the articles and the reporting process, and the company promised to conduct a review.

On Sunday, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng issued a statement saying, “There was no inappropriate bias or personal, political and/or religious motivation in pursuing the story.”

Peng said the stories were newsworthy and that Oxman, with his public profile as a prominent intellectual, was fair game as a subject. The stories were “accurate and the facts well-documented”, Peng said.

“Business Insider supports and empowers our journalists to share newsworthy, factual stories with our readers, and we do so with editorial independence,” Peng wrote,

Business Insider would not disclose who reviewed his work.

Ekman said his wife admitted to missing four quotation marks and one footnote in the 330-page dissertation. He said that the articles could have “virtually killed” his wife had he not had the support of his family and friends.

“She has suffered severe emotional harm,” he said. written on x“And as an introvert, it’s been very, very difficult for her to make it through every day.”

For his part, gay wrote in the times Those who campaigned to oust him “often resorted to lies and ad hoc insults rather than reasoned arguments.” Harvard’s first black president said she has been receiving death threats and has been called the N-word “more times than I can count.”

There was no immediate comment Sunday from Nicholas Carlson, global editor-in-chief of Business Insider. In a memo to his staff last weekend reported by To the Washington Post, Carlson said that he had taken the call to publish both stories and that he knew the process of preparing them was good.

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