Fox Pushes Carly Fiorina's Debunked Claim That Women Held 92 Percent Of Jobs Lost Under Obama

Fiorina's WSJ Op-Ed Repeats A Discredited Claim From Mitt Romney's 2012 Campaign

Written by Craig Harrington

Published

Fiorina Recycles Debunked Romney Claims To Attack Hillary Clinton

Fox News promoted a misleading and debunked claim forwarded by GOP presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina in a Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting that women suffered disproportionate job losses during President Obama's first term.

In an October 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed riddled with misleading, outdated, and debunked claims, Carly Fiorina suggested that Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and President Obama were responsible for the economic distress of millions of women during Obama's first term in office:

While Mrs. Clinton touts her gender to bolster her campaign, 92% of the jobs lost during Mr. Obama's first term -- when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state -- belonged to women, according to the BLS. The National Women's Law Center reports that the poverty rate among women is 16.1% -- the highest level in 20 years -- and the extreme poverty rate among women the highest ever recorded.

On the October 28 edition of Fox News' The Real Story, Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry cited Fiorina's op-ed as an example of legitimate “Republican pushback on the claim that the economy does better under Democrats,” ignoring that the op-ed is replete with glaring factual errors. The specific job-loss claim was widely debunked when then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney first forwarded it in April 2012. PolitiFact rated his claim as "mostly false." The Washington Post's FactChecker labeled the claim “True but False” noting that it was based on cherry-picked data, and as The Post's Wonkblog correctly pointed out, "[t]he reality is that the recession has been easier on women than men." Even the right-wing Daily Caller called out the Romney campaign for its misleading claim.

As for conservatives questioning Clinton's suggestion that the economy improves when a Democrat occupies the White House, according to a July 2014 report by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, “There is a systematic and large gap between the US economy's macroeconomic performance when a Democrat is President of the United States versus when a Republican is.” The authors attributed the differences in economic performance under the two parties to “mostly 'good luck,' with perhaps a touch of 'good policy,'” but still witnessed a “stunningly large partisan gap” in economic growth rates under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Watch the full clip from Fox News below:

HILLARY CLINTON (VIDEO): Though my Republican friends don't like it when I say it, you are four times more likely to end up in a recession under a Republican president.

ED HENRY: Well, Carly Fiorina, one of the Republican candidates of course, is not buying that at all -- that the economy is better under Democrats. She has a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying in part, “While Mrs. Clinton touts her gender to bolster her campaign, 92 percent of the jobs lost during Mr. Obama's first term... belonged to women.” So, you see the Republican push back on this claim that the economy does better under Democrats, Gretchen.