[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCZM19l6lVQ]
The Obama campaign released a new ad Sunday portraying Romney as an “outsourcing pioneer” because of the jobs that were supposedly outsourced during his time at Bain Capital.
It relies on a Jan. 21, 2012 Washington Post story that made similar claims that were debunked by the newspaper itself.
The same day the story appeared, the Washington Post’s own fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, noted that many of the outsourcing claims were false or misleading. Kessler thought an old Obama ad on the same topic was so bad that he gave it “4 Pinocchios” for being false advertising.
As Kessler notes, much of the outsourcing occurred when Romney was no longer actively engaged at Bain. Other examples, such as Modus Media, simply had the company moving jobs from one state to another.
Senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie referred to the original Washington Post article as “shoddy” journalism and said the campaign has reviewed the companies mentioned and believes the facts within the article are incorrect.
American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethoukis also debunked most of the Washington Post story’s specific claims, concluding that it was an example of mixing seemingly “bad reporting” and “bad economics.”
Kessler correctly concluded his previous fact-check by warning that “simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct,” and yet the Obama campaign has chosen to repeat the same falsehoods today.
