How the media spins Chavez

The Guardian, a highly respected left-of-center British newspaper, still has on its Web site an uncorrected report about Hugo Chavez's notorious speech at the UN in September 2006, during which he had held up a copy of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival and recommended it to the audience. Towards the end of the report, Rory Carroll writes:

Last week the former paratrooper lamented not meeting Prof Chomsky before he died.

Of course, Chomsky was alive and well and The Guardian's readers would have taken away from the smirk in Carroll's report a portrait of Chavez the ignoramus, of Chavez the buffoon. At that time, many other reports had gleefully amplified the alleged flub. I had read about it in The New York Times and had seen gleefully condescending reports on TV.

Sadly for Chavez haters, the report, it turns out, was false, made up, spun out of whole cloth. Prof. Chomsky explained it all in a recent interview on C-SPAN. Reporters who later went back to the text of Chavez's speech found that Chavez was lamenting the passing of John Kenneth Galbraith and regretting not having had the opportunity to meet the famous liberal economist. Some reporter then substituted Chomsky for Galbraith and wittingly or unwittingly set off a viral lie.

The New York Times later corrected the error but, as is usually the case with such corrections, in a way that guarantees that not two in a hundred readers, if even that, would see it.