The Washington Post’s refusal to retract a report that Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital shipped jobs overseas came after the Romney campaign provided the paper a lengthy analysis that found the June 21 front-page story wrong on most charges.
Campaign associates provided the Post with a 10-page PowerPoint and a second detailed report that countered the paper’s story that Romney was responsible for sending U.S. jobs overseas. The analysis of the six firms the Post featured found that Romney grew jobs in the United States and sent none overseas.
In one charge, the Post said Bain-backed Corporate Software Inc. and Stream International Inc. outsourced jobs. In fact, they expanded to countries like Japan and Germany to service customers in those countries and in their languages, not U.S. customers.
Despite the protests, the Post said it was sticking by their story. What’s more, Romney associates said that the Post refused to provide any documentation backing up its story.
Let’s compare two of the story’s examples with the Romney campaign’s documents:
— The Post charged that CSI and Stream set up overseas call centers in Europe and Japan, providing tech customer help services previously done in the U.S. Romney’s documents said that by the time Romney left Bain, Stream had grown U.S. call centers from a few hundred employees to about 5,000. They also set up overseas call centers so that help could be provided in the country and language where the help calls originated in.
— The Post said that another Bain investment, GT Bicycle Inc., relied on Asian labor. The Romney said that during Bain’s involvement, jobs in the U.S. were increased from about 350 to 750. Jobs were added in California, New York, Missouri and Florida. “If anything, Bain actually helped GT Bicycles increase exports of bikes made in America,” said the campaign, quoting GT’s CEO.
In another case the Post simply reports that companies Bain invested in had overseas operations that worked with U.S. firms, such as computer firms–hardly a crime.
In all, the companies cited by the post added 5,800 U.S. jobs during Romney’s tenure at Bain, prompting the campaign to charge: “None of the reporting in the Washington Post piece is factually accurate and the piece should be retracted.”
The reason they pushed for a retraction, of course, is because the Obama campaign has been heralding the report that Romney is the “outsourcer-in-chief,” efforts played up in several Post stories.
While shrugged off by Post editors, give credit to Post blogger Jennifer Rubin for highlighting the story’s flaws when she wrote: “You see, there were no jobs in the U.S. that were ‘sent’ anywhere.”
