Nobody, as the rumors of the good professor’s death are premature and grossly exaggerated. And, according to the Chavista news site Aporrea, they are also totally misreported. My own quick and dirty translation from the Spanish follows:
On the TV show “In Confidence”, Ernesto Villegas uncovers evidence that the media, once more, are trying to invalidate the declarations of President Hugo Chavez–this time regarding the US writer Noam Chomsky, during his speech at the UN on the 20th of September.
The New York Times reported that Chavez “killed” Noam Chomsky by saying he was dead; other news agencies did the same. The press in Venezuela echoed those declarations, and El Nacional published an editorial on September 25 which made allusion to the “delicious report” the New York daily had printed on the subject.
Turns out that President Chavez didn’t “kill” Noam Chomsky, Villegas reports, though many believed he had, and described the Venezuelan president as a person with “cultural gaps”.
In the following analysis (video) you can see who really suffers from “cultural gaps” and who “killed” the US writer…
The video (Spanish only) makes clear that Chavez was not speaking of Chomsky as dead, but rather John Kenneth Galbraith–the great Canadian economist who advised Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, and who passed away in April of this year. Somehow, the two intellectuals got conflated in the garbled reporting of the US press (and its Venezuelan parrots, who are all too willing to believe the worst of Chavez anyhow.) What Chavez actually said was that he hoped to meet Chomsky, and also that he wished he could have met Galbraith before the latter died.
Do you suppose the media will correct their mistake, and express regret for “killing” Noam Chomsky?
