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.
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.
