The website carlyfiorina.org claims that Fiorina laid off 30,000 Hewlett-Packard employees and said she wished she had laid them off faster.
Despite this being a completely untrue statement, Politifact rated it as “half true” because 30,000 people were indeed laid off from HP.
Of course, this is not how truth works. The person who purchased the Fiorina domain claimed that the 2016 presidential candidate was referring to the 30,000 laid-off employees when she said: “I would have done them all faster.” The Politifact researcher even acknowledges that this is not true — Fiorina was not referring to 30,000 people laid off when she said she would have “done them all faster.” And that means there is nothing true about the statement at all.
“Rather than musing that she should have laid off 30,000 people faster, the full article suggests she’s referring to a select group of high-ranking executives,” Politifact researcher Louis Jacobson wrote.
He’s referring to an article in Fortune Magazine from 2005 where Fiorina was talking about laying off a select group of high-ranking executives faster, not 30,000 employees:
“Fiorina does not agree, naturally, that there’s been a brain drain. In fact, she believes that one lesson she’s learned while running HP is that she should have moved more quickly in ejecting certain people,” Fortune’s Carol Loomis wrote. “Smartened up now, she says, ‘I would have done them all faster. Every person that I’ve asked to leave, whether it’s been clear publicly or not, I would have done faster.'”
But because the domain name mentioned 30,000 workers first, Politifact is okay making a Republican look bad.
And you don’t have to take my word for it — you can take Politifact researcher Louis Jacobson’s word.
In his ruling on the Fiorina statement, Jacobson wrote: “The claim is partially accurate, but takes some things out of context, so we rate it Half True.”
Now compare that reasoning to this one about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her foundation’s charitable spending: “The claim contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.”
Jacobson was the researcher for both articles.
Update: Politifact’s Angie Holan responded to an Examiner request, noting that the reasoning behind the two different ratings is listed on Politifact’s website. That’s true, but it’s the decision behind whether to give one or the other is what’s at issue here.
By Politifact’s own rating system, the Fiorina claim could have been listed as “mostly false.” While it did contain “some element of truth” (that 30,000 employees were laid off), it ignored “critical facts that would give a different impression” (the fact that Fiorina was not referring to those 30,000 when saying she would have liked to have laid people off faster).
The fact that a complete lie is mixed in with a few true facts in order to make it seem more credible doesn’t make it less untrue. If anything, it makes it more untrue.
