Welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

In tonight’s email, more news and notes on Bill Ackman’s potentially litigious holy war against Business Insider, Axel Springer, and KKR—and the broader media critique in his Twitter treatises.

Mentioned in this email: Andrew Ross Sorkin, Cesar Conde, Claudine Gay, Henry Kravis, Mathias Döpfner, Jimmy Pitaro, Pat McAfee, Peter Thiel and, of course, Ackman.

But first… some Friday thoughts…

🤦‍♂️ Jimmy Pitaro problems: The Athletic has revealed that ESPN, for decades, used fake names in Emmy entries to secure the coveted golden statues and then re-engrave them for ineligible on-air talent. This was obviously an egregiously stupid move that ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro rightly put the kibosh on once it came to his attention. Still, as one veteran media executive texted me this week, it highlights a broader culture of corruption related to the industry’s self-congratulation complex, as well as the pathetic lengths networks go to to service on-air talent. Meanwhile, Pitaro & Co.’s bigger headache is the lingering Pat McAfee-Aaron Rodgers threat. One day after McAfee said he’d stop hosting Rodgers’s weekly segments, wherein the two men had shit-talked certain ESPN executives, Rodgers was back on the show.

🪓 Cesar Conde cuts staff: NBC News started a new round of layoffs this week that will affect somewhere between 50 and 100 employees, per sources familiar with the matter. The layoffs account for a relatively small fraction of the network’s roughly 3,500 staffers, but are nevertheless an unwelcome coda to a particularly brutal year of cost-cutting in the media industry. In the old days, of course, media companies used to bulk up on talent in advance of presidential elections.

It was also Ackman’s first interview since the commencement of his very public battle with Business Insider regarding its multiple reports alleging that his wife, the computational designer and academic Neri Oxman, committed plagiarism in her 2010 dissertation. And his first, of course, since Ackman began sharing an internal monologue on X about his grievances with the reports and his desire to vanquish B.I.

Ackman’s many Twitter treatises would seem to preclude the need for greater excavations of his thinking, and yet Sorkin deftly probed a few of the outstanding enigmas. What’s motivating Ackman? How far was he willing to take his campaign? And, Sorkin inquired with characteristic diplomacy, was he at all concerned that he had already “taken it, to some degree, too far,” and that, “by being such a big figure in this conversation,” he had made it harder to achieve his stated goals? (“I disagree,” Ackman replied, quickly and predictably.)

In my prior conversation this week with Adib Sisani, the Axel spokesperson, he seemed to suggest that Business Insider would not retract or augment the article. “The outcome of the review is pretty clear,” he told me. “The facts of the story stand. I’m certain the sourcing and technical journalistic work done was spotless.” If that is indeed the case, the ball is back in Ackman’s court. And while a spokesperson for Ackman declined to comment, all available evidence suggests he’s unlikely to let the matter lie.

Would Ackman sue Business Insider? Axel? Or KKR, with its market cap of $73 billion? In his interview with Sorkin, Ackman made clear he would not sue Kravis, but left open the possibility of a lawsuit against B.I., which he described as “a rogue news organization,” and Axel, which is “responsible for how Business Insider acts.” In light of Sisani’s statements to me, Ackman argued that Axel was now “a recourse party” for B.I.’s allegedly “illegal” journalism. “When Axel Springer says the facts in the Business Insider story are correct after I put out my 6,000 word thing outlining why the facts are false—the most material thing is, ‘Neri Oxman admitted to plagiarism’; Neri Oxman never admitted to plagiarism—Axel Springer is now a recourse party if there is a lawsuit,” Ackman said. “I hope we don’t end up there.”

Of course, that’s not entirely true. B.I. does make money from programmatic advertising, but that’s only a single revenue line. Similarly, well-established libel and defamation laws are supposed to protect public figures as much as the defenseless. But, whether he wants to or not, Ackman is currently demonstrating that wealthy and powerful individuals do have recourse. (To wit: Claudine Gay’s husband didn’t quite have the same platform to defend his wife…) They can call their wealthy and powerful friends and acquaintances who sit on the boards of these media companies and their private equity backers; they can go on CNBC and make their case; they can file expensive lawsuits—or secretly fund the lawsuits of others, as Peter Thiel did when he provided Hulk Hogan with $10 million for the invasion-of-privacy lawsuit that took down Gawker, the site that years earlier had outed Thiel as gay.

Undoubtedly, this tension gets to the heart of Axel’s current dilemma. On the one hand, it obviously wants to uphold B.I.’s right to write about public figures without fear or favor, and certainly does not want to be seen as capitulating to public pressure from an influential billionaire. On the other hand, it may also recognize that, to borrow from Sisani’s interpretation, B.I. may have “spiked the football” in the manner in which it chose to characterize Oxman’s mistakes, besmirching her reputation over the miscrediting of a few paragraphs from a 330-page academic paper on “Material-based Design Computation.” Rarely has more public-rattling consternation emerged from such turgid source material. (This case is still being litigated, and more accusations against Oxman are being levied. Time will tell.)

The First Amendment is squarely on Business Insider’s side, of course. More pressing for Axel at this moment is the question of its reputation with the business community and, more pressing still, how long it wants to deal with the $4 billion net-worth pit bull experiencing a violent episode in its living room.

Then again, as with Claudine Gay, none of this has ever really been about plagiarism, any more than Al Capone’s arrest was about tax evasion. It is, however, as Ackman himself acknowledged in the Sorkin interview, evidence of the way in which plagiarism can be weaponized. And now, because suffering always begets suffering, Ackman says he plans to scrub the records of every professor at M.I.T. for plagiarism in order to “make a point” about how commonplace Oxman’s mistakes—or “clerical errors,” as Ackman calls them—are. “We’re going to know, once we finish this review, how many other members of the M.I.T. faculty have this problem. And if it’s plagiarism, because we find a dozen paragraphs without attribution and you know, 300 other members of the faculty, then it makes no sense.”

Needless to say, such a broad-sweeping plagiarism review would likely do more than merely “make a point.” It would instead expand the already very wide blast radius of public shame and reproach over questions of plagiarism that, while certainly essential to the integrity of academia, is quite a few detours away from where Ackman started when he set out to combat antisemitism at Harvard.