[Peace-discuss] NYT confesses error on Chavez/Chomsky, says they were slow to correct

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/corrections.html

Editors' Note
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.