Politico's Byers Drags Romney, 13 Years After Leaving Bain Capital, Into a Story About Firm's Involvement in Layoffs at Time

Someone needs to tell Dylan Byers at the Politico that the 2012 presidential smear campaign is over, and their guy won.

Byers seems not to have gotten the memo, and is still engaged in associating Mitt Romney with the firm he left in 1999 any time it has involvement in decisions relating to layoffs. In the current instance, Bain was engaged as an advisor to a new CEO at Time Inc. -- meaning that management of the company involved could have ignored the firm's advice -- and not as an investor. It doesn't matter to Byers, who named Romney anyway, even though Ad Age, the underlying source, didn't (presented in full because of its brevity; bolds are mine):

We reported yesterday that Time Inc. was laying off roughly 500 employees, or 6 percent of its staff. One detail we didn't note: Bain & Co., the global management consulting firm where Mitt Romney once worked, was involved in the layoffs.

AdAge reports that one of Laura Lang's first moves as CEO "was to call a top-to-bottom review facilitated by consultants from Bain & Co., evaluating priorities, opportunities and trouble spots."

The latest round of cuts should bring Time Inc. staff down to about 7,500 employees, meaning it is still the largest magazine publisher in the U.S.

I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that any firm engaged to review Time's situation ("revenue over the first nine months of the year ... down 6.2% from the equivalent period in 2011 (and) more than 26% below the first nine months of 2008") would have recommended that some layoffs were in order.

Next up at the Politico: A story about something -- anything -- negative which might be happening at Godfather's Pizza, just to give Byers the chance to write that Herman Cain "was once CEO there." That was 1996. Zheesh.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.