lunes, diciembre 10, 2012

AP's Sloppy Reporting on Cuban-American Electorate

The AP's Miami bureau has a sloppy story today regurgitating the same narrative about the "changing" Cuban-American electorate.

We've literally seen variants of this story since The New York Times first wrote on December 5th, 1965:

The very active anti-Castro groups in Miami have faded into virtual obscurity.”

Today's AP story contains only one fact, which it got wrong:

"Exit polling showed that 49 percent of Cuban-Americans voted for the Democrat, roughly the same percentage as four years ago."

Even though analysis-after-analysis has shown that President Obama got approximately 35% of the Cuban-American vote in 2008, the AP's exit polls had him getting 49% four years ago.

It obviously wasn't true then, and as precinct analyses have shown since the 2012 election, it's not true this year either. 

The rest of the story is all narrative by the AP's reporter, Christine Armario.

It is based on four "analysts" -- all of whom have lobbied (in some fashion or other) for unconditionally normalizing relations with the Castro regime.

Thus, their spin that Obama has some sort of a mandate to further ease whatever remaining sanctions he can (within the legal confines of the 1996 and 2000 codification by the U.S. Congress).

Even the AP's Havana bureau tries to show a bit more balance than this -- and that is saying a lot.

Why didn't they ask any Obama campaign officials why they so effectively wedged Paul Ryan's past support for lifting the travel ban and embargo against Romney?

The Financial Times responsibly asked and here's what they told them:

"Paul Ryan, Mr Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, had voted a number of times to end the longstanding US embargo on communist Cuba, which had been in place for decades since Fidel Castro came to power.

'That did their ticket a lot of harm with Cubans and allowed us to at least get a hearing with them about many other economic issues,' said an Obama campaign official in Florida."

But, of course, that would go against the AP's narrative.

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