Did Gasparino's Pedigree Cost Him a Job? 'Nonsense,' Says Editor

Like many of his new colleagues in the Fox News extended family, Charlie Gasparino likes to paint himself as a victim of elite snobbery -- even when the facts don't necessarily support him.

Gasparino, who jumped from CNBC to Fox Business Network earlier this year, claimed in an interview published this week that the scrappy, working-class roots he's so proud of once cost him a job at a newspaper. "I [was] turned down by the Dallas Morning News because I didn't have the right pedigree -- a Harvard degree," he said. (He received an undergraduate degree from Pace University and a master's in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.)

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 insists that was in fact, what he was told. "They also told me I needed to dress better," he says, in a comment relayed by a spokeswoman. "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." (That history includes yesterday's market-moving report about a possible settlement between Goldman Sachs and the SEC.)