Gov. John Kasich called our office on Thursday to apologize.
He said we shouldn't have taken him so seriously and that he was joking when he popped off at a news conference with a cry of "fake news" and told reporters that The Dispatch was wrong in reporting newly recalculated job-creation numbers -- numbers provided by his administration.
"Look, if I'm wrong, I say so. You were right, and I was wrong," he told Dispatch Editor Alan Miller.
A week ago, we noted that the state recalculation of official job gains for 2017 was 12,500 -- down from the state's previous estimate.
Here's how we got that number: Dispatch business reporter Mark Williams, who knew this was the time of year when new federal data cause revisions of annual job-creation statistics, asked the Kasich administration's Department of Job and Family Services for yearly job totals since 2011.
Williams, our expert on these statistics, wrote the lead story for Page A1 on March 10 reflecting the lower annual job creation totals. Kasich's spokesman was quoted in the story, but no one from his office questioned the numbers at that time.
This column came out the next morning, explaining that the 2017 total means that in both of the past two years under Kasich, Ohio performed worse in job creation than under the final year of Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.
And the day after that, during a gathering with reporters on Monday afternoon, Kasich was asked about the Dispatch report on his jobs numbers being worse than Strickland's in 2010.
"Their numbers are wrong; so, fake news," Kasich replied.
Later in the afternoon, a spokesman for Job and Family Services called to say that the jobs figures the agency had given to us were incorrect, and provided different ones -- revised upward to 32,200, which still means that the totals for the past two years remain below those of Strickland's final year. That story appeared in Tuesday's paper.
And while Kasich said on Thursday that those revised numbers are still lower than he would like to see, he reiterated that he is pleased that "nearly half a million" jobs were created under his watch.
Un-Kasich like...
The Trump-like charge of "fake news" was the only time in the memory of several Statehouse reporters that Kasich used that tactic.
In fact, he has been a strong supporter of a free press -- even when he doesn't like what we publish. During an Associated Press legislative and political preview Jan. 31, he decried attacks on the media increasingly employed by the White House and its supporters.
"Seems like everything is 'fake news' and you can't believe what you read," Kasich told a couple of dozen journalists. "This idea that there's nothing that we can trust anymore -- nothing -- to me it is very concerning."
He went on to say that those kind of complaints fit a pattern.
"The first thing that happens when people want to be bullies, and they're autocrats or whatever it is, is that they go to restrict the press. So, do all the complaining you want, but thank God we have the press. To me, it is just one of those essential things that we have in our country that is so important for the fabric of who we are as Americans."
While some of his fellow Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are asserting privately that Russia clearly worked to elect Donald Trump in the 2016 election, Rep. Brad Wenstrup is sticking with the panel's GOP chairman's assertion that the goal was simply to disrupt the election without preferring either Trump or Hillary Clinton.
In an interview with Jessica Wehrman of the Dispatch Washington bureau last week in his Capitol Hill office, the Cincinnati Republican said the committee "pretty much agreed they really weren't for Trump -- they were for disrupting our process any way they possibly could.
"I've said all along, this whole thing with Russia is 'heads I win, tails you lose.' They're achieving what they wanted to achieve, because if she wins, they have things on her; they want to demean her. And if he wins, he's not legitimate and we're fighting about that."
(c)2018 The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio)
