The spectacle of the German media giant Axel Springer investigating one of its US media outlets for reporting truthful information about a wealthy and influential pro-Israel couple is a startling demonstration of the impact of the conglomerate’s explicit ideological agenda (FAIR.org, 11/5/21).
Business Insider (1/5/24) accused Neri Oxman of “multiple instances of plagiarism in which she passed off writing from other sources as her own without citing the original in any way.“
Business Insider (1/4/24, 1/4/24, 1/5/24) reported how Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor whose billionaire husband led the crusade that forced out the president of Harvard under accusations of plagiarism, had herself engaged in sloppy research that could similarly be described as plagiarizing.
It was a proud case of a media outlet holding an absurdly wealthy political partisan, hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, accountable. Ackman had initially pressured his alma mater to oust its president Claudine Gay for allegedly failing to condemn campus antisemitism, but then focused on charges (put forth by right-wing activist Christopher Rufo—Washington Post, 1/4/24) that Gay had improperly cited academic work. Ackman asserted that Harvard would expel a student who committed “much less” plagiarism than Gay (Washington Post, 1/8/24).
But rather than celebrating its outlet’s achievement, Business Insider‘s owner is launching an investigation into the reporting on Oxman, responding to voluminous complaints from Ackman. “Axel Springer is conducting its own internal investigation into how the stories came about,” the Wrap (1/7/24) reported. While Business Insider‘s global editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson said he stood by the story, he said Ackman and others have “raised concerns about our reporting process, as well as the motivation for publishing the stories.”
Investigating motives
The Guardian (1/3/24) reported that Bill Ackman, “who accused Gay of antisemitism and plagiarism, was a major player in what increasingly became a right-wing campaign against the Harvard president.”
Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, Ackman has been a vocal critic of pro-Palestine sentiment on American campuses, especially at Harvard. In McCarthyite fashion, he demanded to know the names of students who spoke out against Israeli policy (Fox News, 10/10/23). And he was a huge player in the right-wing movement to force Harvard to remove Gay (Guardian, 1/3/24), whose hiring he argued was an example of “racism against white people” (Twitter, 1/3/24).
Ackman has been vocally upset by the reporting on his wife. His fans are also fuming. Tunku Varadarajan of the Wall Street Journal (1/7/24), who sees Ackman as a warrior against pro-Palestinian campus activism, said the Business Insider reporting was “an attack on his wife” that “may intimidate other would-be critics from joining the public fray.”
Springer is investigating the motives behind Business Insider’s investigation. That’s where things get dangerous. The New York Post (1/8/24) reported, “Ackman took aim at the possible motives behind Business Insider’s coverage of Oxman—alleging that the editor of the stories is a ‘known anti-Zionist.’” The editor in question is John Cook.
Springer is a bit like a German analog to the Murdoch empire: a huge company with an ideological agenda. In Springer‘s case, that agenda includes support for Israel, along with the trans-Atlantic alliance and market economics (Foreign Policy, 1/6/22; Guardian, 4/13/23; Deutsche Welle, 4/16/23). During a previous Israeli assault on Gaza, Mathias Döpfner, chair and CEO of Springer, told staffers that didn’t like the company flying the Israeli flag at its headquarters that they should leave (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6/21/21).
When the group bought Politico, FAIR (11/5/21) raised concerns that the corporate position that it would expect its editorial staff to be partial to Israel would jeopardize fair reporting on the Middle East and US policy on the Middle East. Indeed, “Kasem Raad was fired from his job at Welt TV, a subsidiary of German media company Axel Springer, for questioning internal pro-Israel policies” (Al Jazeera, 11/1/23).
Döpfner made his position clear in a Politico column (10/27/23) that argued that Israel’s war against Gaza wasn’t a mere regional issue, but the frontline in a global war between the enlightened West and the barbaric East. He imagined a world in which evil triumphed:
Europe would become an annex of Asia, with China defining the rules, and the Middle East would return to the Middle Ages, with no possible challenge to Islamic fundamentalism.
The company’s political discipline is now apparently coming down on Business Insider’s staff, a chilling affront to editorial independence.
‘Impressive job of deflecting’
The Springer investigation will likely delve into arguments that Business Insider editor John Cook’s wife said that he had with her family about Zionism (Awl, 6/14/11).
By what rationale is Cook, who has a lengthy track record as a mainstream reporter and editor, some kind of fanatical Palestine partisan, at least in the eyes of Springer’s ideological enforcers? There are two things Ackman and his posse will likely bring up.
Andrew Adler, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, was forced to apologize and resign after writing a column (1/13/12) suggesting that Israel could assassinate then-President Barack Obama (ABC, 1/20/12; Guardian, 1/20/12; Haaretz, 1/23/12). Cook–then a staffer at Gawker, and later the site’s executive editor–was the national journalist primarily responsible for calling attention to Adler’s piece (Gawker, 1/20/12). Tablet (1/23/12), a conservative Jewish outlet, said that Adler was in the wrong and Cook was a fine reporter, but asserted that “Cook wrote a post that may not have been meant as a dog whistle for antisemites, but which certainly had that effect.”
The previous year, Cook’s wife, Allison Benedikt, caused a stir with an essay in the Awl (6/14/11) about her childhood identification and adult disillusionment with Israel. She describes, after meeting Cook, learning from him “about the Israelis being occupiers, about Israel not being a real democracy, about the dangers of ethnic nationalism .” One line about a family trip to Israel stands out in this case: “Once in Tel Aviv, John [Cook] confronts my sister and her husband on their ‘morally bankrupt decision to live in Israel.’” Lest anyone think that such an essay would get lost in the void of the Internet over the last decade, the right-wing Jewish press is still obsessed with Benedikt to this day (Algemeiner, 3/20/23, 8/24/23).
For his part, Cook has appeared unshaken, telling Ackman on Twitter (1/6/24) that he has “done an impressive job of deflecting the plagiarism claims of your wife.” Cook added that the “double standards and overbearing effort to defend your wife against the same claims you used to discredit Gay screams of hypocrisy and nepotism.”
NewsGuild ‘disappointed’
Nothing in Cook’s history undermines the information Business Insider reported about Oxman. But given Springer’s expectation that its staff support various political positions, including endorsing the “right of existence of the State of Israel,” Ackman is clearly hoping that Cook’s previous impure thoughts about the Jewish state get him in trouble with his outlet’s owners.
The NewsGuild of New York chapter at Business Insider released a statement (1/9/24) saying it was “disappointed” in the parent company’s investigation in “response to the attacks on our members’ coverage of Neri Oxman and Bill Ackman.”
It added:
We are watching closely to ensure that the journalistic principles and workplace protections we fought for in our contract are not compromised by Axel Springer or anyone else.
Will Cook meet the same fate as Gay? Maybe, maybe not. What is clear is that FAIR’s earlier concern about Springer’s editorial policy about Israel was warranted. If nothing else, this investigation into Business Insider will make editors at Springer think twice about publishing reported material that may anger a pro-Israel mogul.
Springer, with its really ugly yellow press “BILD”, (meaning: picture) and other papers is a truly bad conservative with prejudices against so many people since many decades. Originally the yellow press BILD mainly contained pictures – hence the name. It was very cheap, so a lot of poorer people bought it daily. BILD’s hate against “foreigners”, or against real Left wing people was put into words by their journalists in ways that attracted and still attract millions of workers and poorer folks. BILD did it intelligently. People all loved, including myself^^, like Franz Beckenbauer, had columns in BILD. And they mixed „buy this and that cheap here“ and daily informations with their conservative and often hateful agenda.
In the beginning of the post-structuralist era after 1990 you could find students at universities “ironically reading BILD”… Well. This was a time where it became cool to “pose as a Left winger” while ever so slowly adopting upper middle class live-styles, while using early identity politics as your “see? I am subversive!” prove. This is also the time when many on the Left forgot the poor, and the poor world wide, while feeling so “post-colonial”. It was a good time for the anti-Left media.
About the support for Israel: After the German Nazis the editor, Axel Springer, made all who worked for him to sign the Springer guideline to support Israel. This one thing was, after Nazi Germany, not a bad idea. Springer, we have to admit, wanted to fight antisemitism which was very strong after 1945, many millions had supported the NSDAP and their Antisemitism. So Springer supported the country where the survivors could escape to.
It was before my times, so I just say what I got told here, but in early times when socialism was strong in Israel conservative Springer still supported Israel very much. I don’t want to applaud a conservative publisher whose papers shared views that were simply horrible and cruel. Not at all. But this was his original intention regarding Israel. This Israel guideline was something nearly all communists, socialists and other Left wing people of Germany after 1945 and Nazi Germany would not have criticized.
I don’t read Fox news daily (there is a limit^^), so I can’t really compare it to BILD. Climate change denial, horrible prejudices against “foreigners”, support of all US wars, slimy soft porn stories with the “picture girl” showing her breasts, that was BILD. They slowly stopped publishing the “picture girl” decades later, but we can suspect that was because the internet made their picture looking like something rather naive.
It is striking for our times that the english/american Wiki doesn’t even mention “Enteignet Springer!” (expropriate Springer!)! That was a huge Left wing campaign around 1968 and for years to come. Leftists fought against this paper, full of half-truths and distortions, and asked to expropriate Springer. After 2000 I talked to self declared Leftists who ridiculed this fight, which tells you a bit about these „new Left“ people. But it was a good fight. BILD had a lot of influence. After a BILD report Rudi Dutschke was shot, and Heinrich Böll wrote a novel against Springer. (Later also Böll was ridiculed by some postmodern „Leftists“. All of this is not researched enough).
Since 20 years the German fake-Left papers like “TAZ” from Berlin ( and many others which aim to be like NYT or Washington Post ) take soft looks on BILD and Springer. There are quite some journalists who change from TAZ to WELT and other Springer papers, and vice versa. While ridiculing „expropriate Springer!“ they started to, „ironically liking Springer“…. This is one of the blind spots of our postmodern Left, alas. “Hey, we are not as foolish as the “old Left” was!” or “We in-scene us daily new, we jump, fluid, from Süddeutsche to Welt etc”. There were meetings between BILD and the now conservative TAZ, which still calls itself “Left-leaning”. TAZ, a eco-Left paper when it started in the late 1970s, called the meeting with the ugly BILD “neighbourhood talk”, or something in the lines of that. They laughed when someone found those meetings dull.
Your story sounds like a nightmare. It is not the only one, as we know.
This is the reason people like me were against this “we cancel X”, “we cancel Y”, which, alas, started from within the postmodern “Left”. And there was no good criticism against this. In this – so they think – “fluid” world criticism is “on the way out”. You simply laugh it away. So instead of criticizing this “we cancel A B and C and all who are like them” (sounds a wee bit like in kindergarden, where kids learn that this is not the best way) intellectuals ignored that, or let it happen and joined.
Now the Right wingers adopt that attitude. And we see how ugly it can be. It replaces the best of enlightenment (with enlightenment ideas you cannot be a racist, for example, and if you are, you are not following the ideas of “all are equal” and universal rights for all, all world-wide). And it works, as we can see. The Left started to cancel, now the powerful Rich try it.
In the case of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman at least this bit is not working out for him: even conservative or liberal papers simply don’t buy his “racism against white people” talk. Here he is an outsider now. Which is a good thing.
There is, besides that the Left is so small and loses, always progress. But progress must help poor people world wide, and it must find a way back to good actions for the poor world wide. In our times a fake-Left person can hate conservative people like Ackman, but in fact can silently wish she was simply someone rich living in capitalism, and they both deny, or by now green-wash, for example, climate destruction since decades. This is a problem…
I don’t know much about Zionism, but it seems to be a radical conservatism, which would make it all make sense. Conservatives who only conserve ignorance still believe in the Great Chain of Being, a human invention that, from profound ignorance, rates every living thing’s right to a full life. To say that Islamists are automatically lower than pig poop is from that cloth. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all emerged from the same place at the same time and all of them hold a conservative sector that is violently hateful to anyone who wrongly interprets their right to be hate bombs holding themselves superior – according to their creation story and its ancient hatreds – to another living thing Gaia created by symbiosis and an unending patience with evolution. Recognizing ignorance is not about a person but about ignorance. But I know from my own experience as a recovering Southern Baptist that ignorance rejoices when we choose to make our ignorance like a body part we’ll kill to keep.
Bottom line, to me, is that all of this ignorance is pre-ecological piffle that means added pain in a world dying from capitalism’s ideologized ignorance of the consequences of infinite growth on a finite planet. There’s no future in an ignorant past. That future is capitalism transforming Gaia into money, ironically a human invention. A hard downturn keeps turning down as the life system is reduced to money that won’t buy bread because there’s no wheat.
Ecological literacy shows that no human on the Great Chain of Ignorance is as useful to life’s continuation on Earth as algae, pond scum, which photosynthesizes, making O2 from CO2 and sugars to feed soil life from the C. Don’t we need to break down a helluva lot of CO2 and get something to eat in the bargain with Gaia?
Ideology amounts to articulated ecological illiteracy. Ecology, after ecoliteracy, is a “how to respond” and doesn’t thrive in “what to know.”
Ecology is on an unknown paradigm, the ecological paradigm, where all this hatred of other living things is seen for what it is: pre-ecological benightedness. A new pre-ecological politics is old hatred pimped up in focus grouped verbiage exactly as ecologically illiterate as the old time religion.
Gaia doesn’t ask us to surrender. She asks that we live so life on Earth continues. We don’t know how to learn to do that until we’re ecologically literate. Gaia wants us ecologically literate and free enough to resist ancient ignorance’s willingness to oppress us. Democracy would help. Democracy’s a “how to know” and not a “what to know.”
Gaia Theory wants us to go home and feed the kids. Show them someone loves them enough to break the Great Chain of Ignorance so we can feel our way into doing it Gaia’s way and grow ourselves in usefulness to Gaia, Earth’s life system, the only thing on this planet that isn’t a human invention that killed parts of Gaia.
Some of my ancestors say we’re here to turn the land right side up again.
There is a future worth having on the ecological paraldigm with Gaia.
Loyalty oaths and journalists do not go together.
I’m continually amazed at my ability to be shocked by this type of bovine biosolids.
Such is life. Thank you very much for your work.
Wow, bovine biosolids !! I had to Google that for a precise definition. Cool and I love learning new stuff. You know Bill Ackman is actually a very interesting dude. Most wealthy people have thin skin and can be thrown off so easily. Not this guy. Really.
Ari-
While the investigation into Business Insider was/is depressing, I think we should all be thankful that Axel did a fair job of analysis on the entire thing, which was certainly not what you would expect given the partisan attitudes that you ascribe to them.
BU staffers are still understandably concerned, but again I think should more than satisfied that their work, when subjected to objective scrutiny from the mother ship, was found to be sterling reporting.
They’re doing McCarthyism again, basically.