The big lie, of course, is the attempt to portray Chavez as some sort of nutcase dictator. In their attempt to do that job, the corporate media focused on the "devil" reference in his UN speech and suppressed the main message, except for the excerpt showing him touting Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival." When that book shot up to the top of the charts, and that fact became news, the time for the little lie had arrived. The corporate media and professional bloggers all began writing articles "demonstrating" that Chavez was really out of touch with reality since he had said it was too bad Chomsky was dead. I fell for that little lie - not thinking that it meant much, but I assumed that those who were claiming Chavez made that statement were credible.
Well, it turns out that that was just one more lie. The NY Times ran a whole article or two pushing this Little Lie, and the Cable channels were filled with corp-whores laughing at this Chavez gaffe. And even DU was filled with individuals repeating that lie. A few days ago Tariq Ali, a guest on Democracy Now!, see
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/17/1439243 , mentioned that this whole story was a hoax, a lie, a fiction.
A couple weeks after the lie first appeared in the NY Times, the editors appended a correction tho the story. Long after the little lie had been spread far and wide. I doubt that any such correction has appeared on the network or cable news, or in any of he newspapers or local news outlets that carried to lie in the first place. "Everybody" who recognizes the names Chavez and Chomsky now "knows" that story. And, I bet, not one in a hundred has ever learned that the story was disinfo propaganda with no basis in fact.
Here's the (much delayed) NY Times correction to the article titled "A Scholar Is Alive, Actually, and Hungry for Debate" by MARC SANTORA:
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Editors’ Note: Oct. 6, 2006
An article on Sept. 21 about criticism of President Bush at the United Nations by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran reported that Mr. Chavez praised a book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and social critic. It reported that later, at a news conference, Mr. Chavez said that he regretted not having met Mr. Chomsky before he died. The article noted that in fact, Mr. Chomsky is alive. The assertion that Mr. Chavez had made this misstatement was repeated in a Times interview with Mr. Chomsky the next day.
In fact, what Mr. Chavez said was, “I am an avid reader of Noam Chomsky, as I am of an American professor who died some time ago.” Two sentences later Mr. Chavez named John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who died last April, calling both him and Mr. Chomsky great intellectual figures.
Mr. Chavez was speaking in Spanish at the news conference, but the simultaneous English translation by the United Nations left out the reference to Mr. Galbraith and made it sound as if the man who died was Mr. Chomsky.
Readers pointed out the error in e-mails to The Times soon after the first article was published. Reporters reviewed the recordings of the news conference in English and Spanish, but not carefully enough to detect the discrepancy, until after the Venezuelan government complained publicly on Wednesday.
Editors and reporters should have been more thorough earlier in checking the accuracy of the simultaneous translation.
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So, other than those who listen to Democracy Now! on a regular basis, and those readers who "pointed out the error in e-mails to The Times soon after the first article was published" has anyone here discovered that this whole thing was a lie?
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