The Washington Post’s fact checker is standing by its decision to rule 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s oft-repeated claim that she rose from secretary to CEO as mostly untrue, even though it concedes her story is factually accurate.
Fiorina’s camp — no lie — is not at all amused.
“It’s kind of amazing to see how these ‘non-partisan fact checkers’ are unable to come to grips with reality,” campaign spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told the Washington Examiner’s media desk Tuesday evening.
The fact checker, which awarded Fiorina’s supposed “rags-to-riches” story three Pinocchio’s, just one shy of a full flunking grade, claims her story is deeply misleading as it leaves out important details of her personal life. Those details include that she had a good education and that her father was well connected in higher education.
As proof that the former Hewlett-Packard CEO didn’t exactly move from a secretary’s paycheck to senior management overnight, the initial fact-check, which was written by the Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee, cited both Fiorina’s public comments as well as her autobiography.
But the 2016 Republican presidential candidate’s team maintains that she has never misrepresented the facts of her personal and professional life, arguing further that it’s ridiculous to cite Fiorina’s own book against her to claim she’s misleading voters.
“They are now ready to admit Carly did indeed go from ‘secretary to CEO,’ but since she went to business school in between, they’re going to keep calling her a liar,” Flores told the Examiner. “Did they ever say President Obama wasn’t a community organizer because he later went to Harvard Law School? It’s like that old SNL skit with Mike Myers. They are neither ‘non-partisan’ nor ‘fact checkers’; discuss!”
The Post’s Glenn Kessler conceded Tuesday that Fiorina “did work as a secretary, that she did become a CEO,” and that these claims are indeed “accurate.”
He continued, explaining that his fact checker team flunked the GOP candidate’s story not because it was factually inaccurate, but because it felt misleading.
“We examined the claim and the message it represents to the average voter — not based on two separate pieces of fact. In this case, Fiorina presents her ‘secretary to CEO’ story as a uniquely American one emblematic of the American dream, and leaves the impression that she worked her way up to the latter from the bottom rungs of an industry,” he wrote.
Kessler again reiterated his team’s position that Fiorina’s education and academic connections suggest she lived a charmed life, and that she didn’t simply pull herself up by her bootstraps.
“The tipping point, for us, was the realization that most of her Stanford tuition likely was paid for … because of her father’s employment at Duke University,” he wrote, seemingly implying that people who have the good fortune of having a their tuition paid for don’t also work through college.
“We also were swayed by the fact that the Stanford degree opened doors for her at the real estate broker where she worked briefly as a receptionist and helped get her in the door at business school even though the application deadline had passed,” he wrote.
Kessler added in defense of his fact checker team that they also awarded low marks to what they felt were similarly misleading remarks by President Obama’s re-election campaign when it claimed in 2012 that the commander-in-chief’s mother died because an insurance company refused her coverage on grounds she had a pre-existing condition.
“In our minds, the Fiorina case was similar. The ‘secretary to CEO’ line is a central part of her campaign; it even merited its own website,” he wrote. “Yet her career really started after she earned her business degree and began working at AT&T as a sales representative.”
Seeing no fault with their original rating, the fact checker stood by its initial analysis, writing, “We are comfortable with the analytic process we used to reach the final result.”
Kessler does, however, regret that his team initially described Fiorina’s story as “bogus.”
“Not everyone agrees with us on The Pinocchio Test or the rating, and readers can always reach their own conclusions based on the information we present in the facts,” he wrote.
