For those who are interested, I did an interview with On the Media’s Bob Garfield about my CJR piece on the dispute over Romney and outsourcing at Bain Capital:

An addendum: People seem to be having difficulty holding two seemingly contradictory facts in their minds at the same time:

1. The claims made in President Obama’s ads suggesting Mitt Romney shipped jobs overseas cannot be substantiated using the available evidence. There is no direct evidence that he played an active role in the decisions made by the Bain companies in question.

2. The accounts provided by Romney and Bain of his legal status during the key 1999-2002 period are murky and not fully consistent with the available evidence. Romney may have been involved in some way with Bain or the companies in which it invested; we don’t know how much.

As I say in the interview, it’s reasonable to argue that Romney was morally responsible for the actions taken by Bain given his formal role and ownership stake. But the Obama campaign has gone much further. Reporters need to dig deeper and help resolve these questions. With that said, the tension between #1 and #2 is unlikely to go away. Journalists or commentators need to learn to negotiate the tension between those two facts, awkward as it may be.