The Attack on Business Insider Is Insidious and Stupid

Can we please stop weaponizing antisemitism in these obviously nonsensical ways?

Neri Oxman. (Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

For reasons both astonishingly complex and depressingly obvious, 2024 has already established itself as a banner year for antisemitism—both the very real kind and the kind that’s entirely made up.

While the first sort can be easily found across the vast expanse of Elon Musk’s X-tremely shitty social media app, the second kind has been popping up in all kinds of surprising places lately—including, apparently, the uppermost echelons of Axel Springer, the Berlin-based media giant that owns sites Politico, Die Welt, and a host of other, largely European publications. The company also happens to own Business Insider, which last week published a two-part investigation into former MIT professor Neri Oxman’s alleged—and seemingly widespread—doctoral thesis plagiarism.

In normal times (whatever those are) Insider’s investigation would be an interesting, if not hugely urgent bit of news. The sort of enterprise journalism that an upper-middle tier outlet like BI can deservedly hang its hat on as an example of genuine—and genuinely good—reporting.

Unfortunately, in this instance, the investigation came just days after a host of right-wing activists successfully ousted former Harvard President Claudine Gay from her Ivy League ivory tower—supposedly for plagiarizing some of her academic output, but actually just for being a Black woman in a position of power who made a few very public screw-ups that allowed bad faith operators to notch another shitty win in their expanding culture war belts. And, because this is the world we live in, what started as a fairly straightforward investigation into a marginally noteworthy academic and start-up character has morphed into something much more insidious…and much more stupid.