The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog, after years of usually sincerely prepared though not always accurate posts, appears to have descended to the level of hackery typically found at Politifact.
One recent example demonstrating that the effort has turned into a weapon dishonestly employed against Republicans and conservatives comes from Michelle Ye Hee Lee, who on Friday called 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina's true story about once being a secretary and eventually becoming a Fortune 20 CEO "bogus," giving it "three Pinocchios." That means, according the paper's description, that the claim itself is a "Significant factual error," that it contains "obvious contradictions," or both. What rubbish.
Ms. Lee's review is about three related Fiorina statements:
- “I started as a secretary, typing and filing for a nine-person real estate firm. It’s only in this country that you can go from being a secretary to chief executive of the largest tech company in the world, and run for president of the United States. It’s only possible here.”
- “My story, from secretary to CEO, is only possible in this nation, and proves that everyone of us has potential.”
- “A self-made woman, she started her business career as a secretary and went on to become the first, and to date, the only woman to lead a Fortune 20 company.”
It begins with a very harsh headline, and a false premise:
Carly Fiorina’s bogus ‘secretary to CEO’ career trajectory
(Florina's bio) evokes a rags-to-riches-esque narrative reminiscent of a Horatio Alger novel — where the main character, with grit, hard work and some luck, lifts himself out of humble beginnings to achieve success.
From the beginning, Ms. Lee indicated that she was going to invent a problem instead of reading the plain words in Fiorina's bio. The candidate isn't claiming rags-to-riches (or "rags-to-riches-esque"; talk about "bogus" - what a bogus term). She's claiming that she worked hard, and smart, and took advantage of the opportunities presented.
Before her final evaluation, Lee reminded us that she intended to deliberately misinterpret Fiorina's narrative:
At The Fact Checker, we take a “reasonable person” standard to examining claims and reaching conclusions. We take no stance on Fiorina’s qualifications as a business executive. Fiorina’s description of rising “from secretary to CEO” conjures a Horatio Alger-like narrative where a character starts at the lowest ranks of an industry, pulls themselves up by their bootstraps and, against all odds, reaches the top position in the industry.
Here is Lee's evaluation narrative (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
(Fiorina's) description glosses over important details. Her father was dean of Duke Law School when she was at Stanford, meaning Duke would have paid for most of her college tuition. [1] She graduated from Stanford, and her elite degree played a role in the stories of her at Marcus & Millichap (she was the “Stanford student” [2]) and her convincing the business school dean to accept her into the MBA program [3] (“So, can a liberal arts student from Stanford compete with the analytical jocks you have around here?”).
She worked briefly as a secretary in between law school and business school, but she always intended to attend graduate school for her career. [4] She moved up through AT&T with her MBA, and was placed on a fast track to senior management [5] after her company sponsored her to attend one of the most elite mid-career fellowships in the world. Her role as senior executive at Lucent caught the attention of HP recruiters, to become the company’s chief executive. [6]
Fiorina uses a familiar, “mailroom to boardroom” trope of upward mobility that the public is familiar with, yet her story is nothing like that. In telling her only-in-America story, she conveniently glosses over the only-for-Fiorina opportunities and options beyond what the proverbial mailroom worker has. As such, she earns Three Pinocchios.
Notes, which address Lee's "only-for-Fiorina" claims:
[1] — So what? She didn't use this "opportunity," so its existence is irrelevant.
[2] — If Fiorina had conducted herself unprofessionally or incompetently, she wouldn't have earned the positive "Stanford student" moniker. What was she supposed to do, lie on her employment application so no one knew where she went to school? Additionally, she got this job by going through want ads to which anyone could respond. That's not "only-for-Fiorina."
[3] — Fiorina used her powers of persuasion, which last time I checked, is not a power only possessed by her.
[4] — Carly Fiorina is hardly the only person who has worked as a secretary who planned to further her education and go elsewhere. Again, so what?
[5] — This was not an "only-for-Fiorina" opportunity. This was, as AT&T saw it, an "earned-by-Fiorina" opportunity.
[6] — So now it's Carly's fault that she got noticed after being recognized for, according to Fortune, doing a good job at AT&T?
Several commentators have rightly objected to the Post's evaluation of Fiorina's accurate life story shorthand statement, including John Sexton at Breitbart and Howard Kurtz at Fox News.
In defending their evaluation, the Post said, in essence: "Well, we gave Barack Obama three Pinocchios back in 2012. That proves we're fair."
Actually, it proves the opposite. Specifically, the Post said:
A good example is the Three Pinocchio rating we gave President Obama’s campaign in 2012 for a campaign video narrated by Tom Hanks, concerning his mother’s fight with an insurance company.
That's a bogus comparison, and perfectly illustrates the Post's long-present left-right double standard.
The Hanks video falsely left the impression that Obama's mother's fight was about health insurance, when it was really over disability insurance. This continued a years-long pattern of deception by Obama and his campaign over the nature of that dispute. Concerning this matter in 2011, blogger Ann Althouse wrote:
Obama lied about a central fact about his own life which he used — powerfully — to push health care reform.
In other words, Obama's serially made false claim deserved four Pinocchios as a "whopper" — and the Post didn't have the integrity to accurately tag it.
There's nothing even remotely close to a false claim in Fiorina's bio. Even if you buy into Lee's take over her "trajectory" and whether Florina got any "only-for-Fiorina" breaks (which we shouldn't), the worst conceivable evaluation should have been one Pinocchio ("Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth").
The Post's descent into trying to tell us that what is obviously true is false is a relatively recent but recurring phenomenon.
Last week, as I noted in a post yesterday, Fact Checker Glenn Kessler gave Ben Carson's utterly true description of the Islamic term taqiyya four "Pinocchios," while claiming that Carson expressed "a discredited and inaccurate interpretation." Too bad for the Post that a "secular Muslim" essentially confirmed taqiyya's existence as Carson described it just two days later — and that was just the latest piece of evidence among a trove of it proving that taqiyya is all too real.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
