Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Back in the US, debates about the war in Israel and Gaza have refracted into convoluted sideshows. This week when the same billionaire who wielded plagiarism accusations to unseat Harvard, President Claudine Gay, went after a news outlet that made similar allegations against his wife. A quick reminder of how we got here.

Speaker 8: Protests that erupted after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel have roiled college campuses across the country.

Speaker 9: College campuses are deeply divided, including here at Harvard.

Speaker 10: The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania are testifying on Capitol Hill about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Micah Loewinger: Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York followed up.

Speaker 11: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Speaker 12: It can be depending on the context.

Will Sommer: Republican representative, Elise Stefanik saw this as an opportunity to really press these college presidents.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a media reporter at The Washington Post.

Will Sommer: I think a charitable way to look at it is that she wanted them to take a firm stance on anti-Semitism. I think a less charitable way is that she was looking for a soundbite and really trying to back them into a corner. The point Claudine Gay was making was nuanced, but that doesn't really work in Congress, particularly if you have a hostile interviewer.

Micah Loewinger: From there, various activists got involved, particularly Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager, and Christopher Rufo campaigning to get her and some of these other university presidents fired. Rufo has openly discussed over the years how he has successfully manipulated the media to raise panic around a whole bunch of culture war issues like critical race theory. He was successful in helping turn CRT into a catchall boogeyman, applying the same strategy to raising alarm around healthcare for transgender people.

Most recently, he has set his sights on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Can you just give us a sense of what role Christopher Rufo played in shaping the conversation that we all ended up having for the last month or so?

Will Sommer: Yes. Christopher Rufo is really good at latching onto these wedge issues and getting Republicans to pick them up. In December, shortly after Claudine Gay is facing all this pressure from the Congressional hearing, he then comes out with these plagiarism allegations against her. Now, apparently, these allegations had been floating around on the Internet, someone had packaged them up into one document, a person who seems to have been opposed to her management of Harvard in terms of anti-Semitism. Christopher Rufo was the first one to really go public with them.

Micah Loewinger: Alongside Christopher Rufo was billionaire Bill Ackman. He's one of those hedge fund guys who's so rich that we should know more about him, but if I'm being honest, I had no idea who he was until all of this started.

Will Sommer: I only became aware of him because, on the HBO stock market show industry, there's a character based on him played by one of the Duplass Brothers. He's like a pop culture figure in some way. Bill Ackman became famous during the pandemic because of some smart plays he made predicting that the pandemic would depress stocks and then predicting that the stock market would rebound. That's what elevated him from rich guy to rich guy, a lot of people think is a fount of wisdom in some way.

Micah Loewinger: Why was he lending his platform to the campaign to get Claudine Gay to resign?

Will Sommer: Bill Ackman is a Harvard alum. After October 7th, he became convinced that Harvard students were just running amok with anti-Semitism. Even before the Congressional hearing, he was on this campaign to get the board of Harvard to fire Claudine Gay. After these plagiarism allegations come out, he latches onto that. The anti-Semitism stuff takes a backseat, and then he says, "Well, look, you simply have to fire her because of this plagiarism issue."

Micah Loewinger: What were the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay?

Will Sommer: It was research papers or publications where she would cite research she was drawing on. Then, rather than putting quotation marks around the phrasing, she would just take the phrasing wholesale.

Micah Loewinger: The source would show up in the bibliography, but in some of her research, the source she was quoting from, that same language showed up, not in quotes.

Will Sommer: Yes, in the bibliography, or even at the end of the paragraph, material that should have been in quotation marks was not in quotation marks. Bill Ackman met with members of the Harvard community. He claims to have met with students and professors and board members. He said, "Something like this if an undergrad did even less plagiarism than this, or a more minor instance, they would've been expelled from Harvard. What does it say that the president of this institution is a plagiarist?"

Micah Loewinger: We have Christopher Rufo, Bill Ackman really pushing this. Then we had media coverage from the conservative press, most notably The Washington Free Beacon that broke a lot of these stories about Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism. The New York Times also played a significant role in keeping the heat on these university presidents and Claudine Gay specifically, a lot of stories on their front page.

Last week, media critic Adam Johnson, who's the host of Citations Needed posted to X that "Articles about Claudine Gay and her various scandals were top five featured stories on The New York Times homepage December 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 17th, 22nd, and 25 and her firing is now their top story." On January 2nd, the day that she resigned, Christopher Rufo tweeted, "This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America's institutions. We will expose you, we will outmaneuver you, and we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation." What do we make of that?

Will Sommer: This is not exactly particularly coded language. There's the insinuation there that Claudine Gay was essentially an affirmative action hire that her scholarship did not justify becoming the president of Harvard and that the plagiarism underlines that. This was seen by the right as a symbolic victory against affirmative action or diversity, equity inclusion, what they see as the post-2020 progressive cultural landscape.

Micah Loewinger: Two days after she resigned, Bill Ackman the billionaire, was now the subject of a similar story that he would not like very much, a Business Insider investigation that ran with the headline, "Bill Ackman's Celebrity Academic Wife Neri Oxman's Dissertation is Marred by Plagiarism." Okay. First off, who is Bill Ackman's wife academic Neri Oxman?

Will Sommer: Sure. Neri Oxman is a professor at MIT in a idiosyncratic category called Material Ecology, which is something she invented. She does TED Talks. She's a big hit on podcasts. I listened to a podcast she was on where she talks about what if we could grow iPhones in nature. She was on the cover of Fast Company Magazine of WIRED Magazine. She was profiled in The New York Times. She really had a successful career on her own and is a public figure in her own right.

Micah Loewinger: Last Friday, Business Insider ran another story about Neri Oxman in which they found 28 additional cases of plagiarism in her dissertation. In some cases, Business Insider alleges that she lifted passages from Wikipedia without attribution. How did her plagiarism compare to that of Claudine Gay?

Will Sommer: Some of her plagiarism is actually very similar in that there are citations to articles and yet she is, rather than paraphrasing the material, as you should, she's taking it wholesale without putting quotation marks. She's acknowledging there's another source for this idea or this data, but then she's not acknowledging that she's also taking these words.

Micah Loewinger: Neri Oxman seemed to acknowledge the reporting and the instances of alleged plagiarism that were found. How did her husband Bill Ackman respond?

Will Sommer: Bill Ackman went ballistic. He has since Friday, been on a Elon Musk or Trumpian level of Twitter meltdown.

Micah Loewinger: Saying what?

Will Sommer: "Business Insider didn't give us enough time to comment on this. Business Insider's going to go bankrupt and be liquidated." Essentially his argument is, "This is really unfair. Business Insider is only writing about my wife because I was involved in getting Claudine Gay fired and in fact, is it even really plagiarism? Who's to say what plagiarism is? Why can't you plagiarize from Wikipedia?" He does a U-turn from, "We got to stamp out plagiarism in academia. This stuff is so serious," to, "It's a matter of degrees and some plagiarism is like a spelling error. Are you going to hold that against my wife?"

Micah Loewinger: First, he claimed that, as you said, they didn't give him enough time to respond. Second, he says, "It's not fair for them to go after his family just because he's in the news." Third Ackman says that a top editor at Business Insider has been critical of Israel and therefore potentially had ulterior motives in pushing the story because Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman is Israeli. This is where Axel Springer gets involved.

Axel Springer is a big German media company that owns Business Insider and Politico and many German outlets, including the conservative newspaper Die Welt. Ackman brought his suspicions that there's some anti-Zionist agenda to take down his wife right up the chain of command right to Axel Springer, what happened next?

Will Sommer: Then Axel Springer makes a very unusual move. They put out a statement on their own, separate from Business Insider saying, "Well, no one disagrees about the facts here, yet we are still going to review this story because we are looking into the motivations and the processes of how this story came about." That really suggests that they really want to throw Bill Ackman a bone here. They want to undermine the reporting in some way so that he can say, "Well, that story's under investigation," and yet there's frankly just not a factual basis for them to do that.

Micah Loewinger: In your reporting, you found that Axel Springer actually has some unusual policies for how it runs its companies, at least by American journalism standards.

Will Sommer: Over the past decade, Axel Springer has really been increasingly getting involved in the American media market. They own Business Insider and they own Politico. I've been anticipating the day this conflict would arise because Axel Springer operates in a way that American media outlets do not. It requires employees in Germany to sign a statement of political principles. You have to commit to support NATO, support the right of Israel to exist among other things. That would never happen at an American outlet, certainly not a mainstream outlet.

Axel Springer after an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany, its CEO flew the Israeli flag in front of headquarters for a week and he said, "If anyone has a problem with what this suggests about us not being entirely nonpartisan when it comes to Israeli coverage, you're welcome to quit your job and leave Axel Springer." At Business Insider, the Editor in Chief there put out an email to the staff that almost was a brushback to the corporate ownership in Germany and said, "We are really standing by this story. There's nothing wrong with this story. We welcome any review."

Micah Loewinger: Bill Ackman, he's not done fighting. On Monday this week, he posted on Twitter/X that he will pursue "problems with how our media operates, the ideological takeover of our education system, discrimination in all forms, and free speech to the end of the earth." He says that this is the most important battle he's ever fought. Do you see any bigger messages in the story about the influence that billionaires like Bill Ackman wield? What does it mean?

Will Sommer: There's this story about billionaires, whether it's Elon Musk or Peter Thiel who bankrolled essentially the destruction of Gawker legally, or Bill Ackman get very involved and often with, in the case of Musk and Ackman, with a Twitter veilance to it. They're very willing to pursue these pet projects with their money.

Micah Loewinger: To twist personal slights into populist crusades and pretend that they're fighting for the common person or universal values when their ego has just been scratched a bit.

Will Sommer: I was struck by, after the plagiarism allegations against Neri Oxman came out, that Bill Ackman said, "Oh, this plagiarism, these allegations, this is like Oppenheimer inventing the atomic bomb. This is going to change the world forever, but we'll just have to destroy academia and rebuild it." It's just like, "What? Just because your wife was accused of plagiarism, you have to just remake the American university and stuff?"

Micah Loewinger: Well, let me ask you about that because in an op-ed published in The New York Times, Claudine Gay after she resigned, argued that the campaign to have her resign was "a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society." She goes on to say, "Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda." Do you think she had a point?

Will Sommer: I think she does have a point. I do think that there has been a decades-long attack from the right on independent institutions, particularly ones that relate to truth and reason, whether it's science. We can think of all the attacks on scientists and medicine during the pandemic, or these decades-long attacks On the Media where these attempts to paint colleges is just like these out-of-control loony bins. I do think she's right on there. I think the challenge for her and her supporters has been that if you do feel that you're under all this pressure, it really doesn't help if you have this plagiarism in your background.

Micah Loewinger: Will, thank you very much.

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a media reporter at The Washington Post.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the big arguments over history and language that fuel the small ones swirling around the war.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.