Brendan Farrington

AP, After Nationally Hyped Preview, Treats GOP Win in Jacksonville Mayor's Race as a Local Story
By Tom Blumer | May 21, 2015 | 9:45 AM EDT

The idea that the nation's largest cities are impenetrable Democratic Party strongholds took a serious hit Tuesday night. In Jacksonville, the nation's 13th-largest city, a Republican took back the mayor's office, unseating the incumbent Democrat who won four years ago.

Predictably, the Associated Press, when it sensed that Democrat Alvin Brown might hold on in his reelection attempt, treated the race as a national story the day before the election, identifying Brown as a 2011 beneficiary of an Obama campaign effort which "targeted ... 2008 and 2012 with the goal of making a solidly Republican area more competitive," and tagging him as "on a short list of Democrats seen as potential candidates for governor in 2018" if he won. Today, with Republican Lenny Curry winning the race, it's crickets at the wire service's national site:

AP Headline and Story: Group Which Opposes Same-Sex Marriage Is 'Anti-Gay'
By Tom Blumer | November 19, 2013 | 1:59 PM EST

The "About" page at the Florida Family Policy Council (FPPC) tells us that it "is one of 38 other state based policy council around the country which are associated with Focus on the Family," and that its mission is "to strengthen Florida’s families through public policy education, issue research, and grassroots advocacy." It claims that is basis for public argument is "using good research, sound arguments and articulate presentations to make the case for pro-life, pro-family values in the public square."

FPPC opposes same-sex marriage. According to the Associated Press and AP reporter Brendan Farrington, in a Sunday story (HT Twitchy) carried at the Miami Herald which seems not to have appeared at the wire service's national site, that means the FPPC is "anti-gay":

AP on Rubio Assumes He's Still the One on the Defensive Over Parents' Cuban Departure
By Tom Blumer | October 25, 2011 | 12:12 AM EDT

Despite all the huffing and puffing over Florida Senator Marco Rubio's alleged "embellishing" at the Washington Post, the fact is that his parents were Cuban exiles (meaning number 5 at link: "anyone separated from his or her country or home voluntarily or by force of circumstances"). That fact essentially undercuts everything about the WaPo article except the problem with the opening sentence of the biography at Rubio's Senate web site, which has been corrected.

That didn't stop two Associated Press writers, Brendan Farrington and Laura Wides-Munoz from doing quite a bit of embellishing of their own (a better word would be "mischaracterizing") in an item currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, while pretending that the rebuttal to the Post written by Mark Caputo at the Miami Herald doesn't exist. The AP pair's pathetic prose has two particular howlers which simply must be debunked.