Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina scored high marks for her performance in Wednesday’s debate, and it took media groups and personalities just a few hours to come after her with a level of scrutiny generally reserved for top-tier candidates.
The so-called “explainer” website Vox jumped into the field with a broad article from founder Ezra Klein called, “Carly Fiorina won the GOP debate, but fact checkers will have a field day.” He praised her style, but flunked her overall remarks.
Klein isn’t alone, as many of the post-debate articles and comments on Fiorina have focused on two things. One is her controversial tenure as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, which commentators suggest should disqualify her, and the other is her remarks on Planned Parenthood, which her critics say are flat-out false.
And there has been a lot of focus on Fiorina’s remarks on the Planned Parenthood scandal.
Asked by CNN moderator Jake Tapper to comment on a series of secretly recorded videos showing Planned Parenthood executives discussing their methods of salvaging human organs from the remains of aborted infants, Fiorina said that efforts to defund the “women’s health group” speak to “the defense of the character of this nation.”
“[A]nyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, it’s heart beating, it’s legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” she said, reportedly referring to the seventh of 10 undercover videos released this year by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life activist group.
She added, “This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill [that would strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding], shame on us.”
Members of the press, many of whom have claimed that there is no real Planned Parenthood scandal, have been quick to dismiss her comments as overcharged partisan rhetoric, challenging Fiorina for claiming that one of the videos shows a fully formed child kicking and showing signs of life. Vox’s Sarah Kliff, for example, reported that that no such video exists, and that Fiorina’s “heart beating” and “legs kicking” remarks were the stuff of “pure fiction.”
“Carly Fiorina is wrong about the Planned Parenthood tapes. I know because I watched them,” Kliff reported in an article that has been updated since to note that she hasn’t watched all of the footage sourced by the the Center for Medical Progress.
Fusion’s Casey Tolan characterized Fiorina’s answer as “the scariest moment of the GOP Debate so far.”
Amanda Marcotte, Slate’s resident feminist, stated incorrectly that, “There is nothing in the videos made by CMP, either in the edited or full-length versions, that has anything approaching images of legs kicking or hearts beating.”
The pro-Clinton activist group Media Matters for America declared in multiple articles that Fiorina is simply wrong about the nation’s largest provider of abortions. “Media Praise Carly Fiorina’s GOP Debate Attack On Planned Parenthood Despite It Being False,” reads one headline.
Other Media Matters headlines suggest the same, and many of them rely on other members of the press to do the talking for them.
“ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Challenges Carly Fiorina’s False Description Of Planned Parenthood Videos,” one headline states. Another reads, “Rachel Maddow: “Fact-Checking [Carly Fiorina] Right Now Is Like A Three Alarm Fire.”
The New York Times followed Media Matters’ lead, publishing a carefully worded story critical of Fiorina titled, “Carly Fiorina said to exaggerate content of Planned Parenthood videos.”
The Huffington Post wasted no time dressing up its post-debate Fiorina articles, running one story headlined, “Carly Fiorina Stood Up To Donald Trump, But She Isn’t Standing Up For Women’s Issues.”
Some media commentators, however, maintain that Fiorina’s comments were not that far off the mark.
The Federalists’ Mollie Hemingway wrote that Republican candidate was “likely referring to the entirety of the 10 videos, including the seventh video released by the Center for Medical Progress,” and said the footage she describes does indeed exist.
“It does, in fact, show a fully formed fetus, heart beating and legs kicking. And it shows this while Holly O’Donnell, a former organ harvester who worked for StemExpress at a Planned Parenthood affiliate, graphically [discussed] the harvesting of a brain from a baby whose heart was beating,” she added.
The “fully formed fetus” footage doesn’t come from CMP’s sting operation, though the group features it in one of their videos. The still-breathing images referenced by Fiorina come from a video provided to CMP by a separate pro-life group called the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, and the tape clearly depicts an “intact delivery abortion,” according to the group’s founder.
“The video clip we provided to CMP depicted an intact delivery abortion. It was filmed at an abortion clinic. It was not a miscarriage. Mothers don’t go to abortion clinics to miscarry. Had this case been a miscarriage, the mother would have presented at a hospital and her baby would have been rushed to an Isolette for appropriate neonatal care — not abandoned to writhe and eventually expire in a cold, stainless steel specimen vessel,” Gregg Cunningham told the Federalist.
“As regards the organizational affiliation of the abortion facility in which this termination was performed, our access agreements forbid the disclosure of any information which might tend to identify the relevant clinics or personnel with whom we work,” he added. “Preserving confidentiality is vital to future clinic access. I can, however, assure you that the footage in question is not anomalous. It is representative of the frequent outcomes of many late term intact delivery terminations performed at clinics of all organizational affiliations.”
CMP founder David Daleiden explained why they chose to add images of a stillborn child to a video that also features grisly testimony from a former employee of a Planned Parenthood affiliate.
“We never claimed that was an image of an aborted baby. It’s just an illustration of what a baby looks like at the end of the 2nd trimester,” he said in a statement. “It’s interesting that Planned Parenthood and their allies assumed so quickly that’s what was happening – are they just grasping at straws, or are their consciences also starting to get to them?”
National Review contributor Ian Tuttle summed up the press’ response to Fiorina’s Planned Parenthood comments: “[T]he … pile-on is just another example of the eagerness of Planned Parenthood’s backers to zero in on specific details to avoid addressing the claims of widespread, systemic illegality — for example, Planned Parenthood officials haggling over prices for fetal remains (Potential Crime No. 1), Planned Parenthood officials discussing how they alter abortion procedures to procure ‘specimens” (Potential Crime No. 2), or Planned Parenthood officials murdering born-alive infants (Potential Crime No. 3).”
“That sounds like a pattern. Perhaps someone should investigate!” he added.
Fiorina spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores confirmed in a statement to the Washington Post that the sole female voice in the 2016 GOP primary was indeed referring to the seventh CMP video.
“The point is that the tech is describing what she was asked to do,” Flores said. “This is the image playing that Carly saw.”
The press has also been quick to point out that Fiorina, who is second in Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings, was fired in 2005 from HP.
“Carly Fiorina is like [fellow 2016 candidate] Ben Carson, if Ben Carson has been a completely terrible neurosurgeon fired by his hospital for malpractice,” MSNBC Chris Hayes remarked Thursday afternoon on social media.
Forbes’ Janet Novack added, “[Carly Fiorina] was disaster for HP shareholders.”
But not everyone has used the debate as an occasion to recall Fiorina’s troubled past as a CEO. Vox’s Timothy B. Lee, for example, wrote Thursday that her HP history is a bit more complicated than people are making it out to be.
“HP struggled under Fiorina’s management, from 1999 to 2005, and it hasn’t done that well since then. But it wasn’t entirely, or even mostly, Fiorina’s fault,” he wrote.
“Fiorina did not have a transformational vision for HP, and is never going to rank among the best CEOs in Silicon Valley,” he added. “But that’s asking the wrong question — like judging Ben Carson’s fitness for the presidency based on whether he was a great doctor or just a pretty good one. The real question is whether she can convince voters that she has the best vision for the country’s future.”
The Republican presidential candidate defended her record during the second GOP debate.
“I led Hewlett-Packard through a very difficult time, the worst technology recession in 25 years. The NASDAQ stock index fell 80 percent. It took 15 years for the stock index to recover,” she said. “We had very strong competitors who literally went out of business and lost all of their jobs in the process. Despite those difficult times, we doubled the size of the company, we quadrupled its top line growth rate, we quadrupled its cash flow, we tripled its rate of innovation.”
“Yes, we had to make tough choices,” she said, referring to the thousands of layoffs that occurred under her watch, “and in doing so, we saved 80,000 jobs, went on to grow to 160,000 jobs. And now Hewlett-Packard is almost 300,000 jobs. We went from lagging behind to leading in every product category and every market segment.”
She added that the man who spearheaded her ouster, Tom Perkins, eventually conceded in a full page New York Times ad that he was wrong and she was right.
Conceding that her 2005 firing is indeed fair game for questioning, Townhall columnist and Fox News contributor Guy Benson concluded, “HP [questions] are legit for Fiorina. … those issues will linger.”
The candidate’s HP tenure aside, others have criticized some of her policy prescriptions, such as her aggressive call for rebuilding the U.S. military.
Fiorina’s call for a larger military, for example, would cost another $500 billion, the Daily Beast reported Thursday. Fiorina said she wants dozens of new Army brigades and Marine battalions, and up to 350 new ships, but she hasn’t offered any plan to pay for it, the report added.
