Dallas editor: Gasparino snub claim is “nonsense”

The editor of the Dallas Morning News says that Fox Business Network’s Charles Gasparino‘s claim that he couldn’t get a job at the paper 20 years ago because he hadn’t gone to Harvard is “nonsense.”

Jeff Bercovici of DailyFinance.com writes, “Harvard clubbiness is a favorite target of scorn for Fox commentators — even those who, like Bill O’Reilly, studied there — but the Dallas Morning News is not exactly known as an exclusive bastion of Ivy League privilege. Burl Osborne, who was the editor of the paper in 1990, when Gasparino was a job seeker there, got his degrees from Marshall University and Long Island University. Cheryl Hall, the editor of the business section at the time, graduated from Southern Methodist University. Bob Mong, who was then then deputy managing editor overseeing business, did attend a school that sounds a little like Harvard, but it was actually Haverford College in Pennsylvania. (He also did some graduate studies at Stanford’s business school.)

“I asked Mong, now the DMN‘s top editor, about Gasparino’s claim. ‘All I have to say about that is it’s nonsense and it never happened,’ he responded.

“But Gasparino stands by his story, while clarifying that the explanation for his snub came in a second-hand, back-channel conversation, not directly from the person in charge of hiring. ‘They also told me I needed to dress better,’ he says. ‘Look, with all due respect, Bob Mong has no clue about a conversation I had with a senior person at the paper 20 years ago. Perhaps they’re just embarrassed they turned me down given my long history of breaking news.'”

Read more here.