A spokeswoman for The Washington Post tells Talking Points Memo that it won't retract a controversial story about Mitt Romney.
“We are very confident in our reporting,” Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti told TPM after the meeting, adding that appointments with people concerned about coverage are common.
Earlier today, Romney's campaign met with the Post to ask the paper to retract a story claiming that Bain Capital helped invested in companies that sent jobs overseas.
Romney's campaign team, however, has argued that the report is misleading. His staff claim the examples cited in the Post story unfairly imply that foreign call centers were opened to avoid paying American workers when, in fact, the foreign call centers were built to service foreign customers, who did not speak English and were buying American products.
.... But the Obama campaign has maintained that under Romney's tenure, Bain did help fund companies that aided in shipping jobs overseas, and that even the practice of outsourcing domestically meant that wages for middle class Americans were driven down.
Obama has been beating this story to death lately, and has even run TV commercials that specifically cite the Washington Post report.
My guess is that the Romney campaign mainly succeeded on this today -- even though it didn't get the retraction.
That's because most voters will look at a headline about a dispute between Romney and The Washington Post and just assume it's another example of sparring between Republicans and a media it sees as biased against Republicans.
To wit: In a recent poll, 58% of voters thought the media wanted Obama to win, while only 21% thought the media wanted to Romney to win.
And consider this, even Democratic voters (by a 2:1 margin) thought the media wanted Obama to win.
So my hunch is that the Romney team's sharp objection and meeting with the paper is probably enough to make voters think this is just an example of Romney being partisan, on the one hand, and the media being partisan, on the other.
Whether that's true or not is another matter, but it's the perception that ultimately matters to voters.
