Noam Chomsky was pronounced dead for a few hours on Wednesday. The most famous committed intellectual in the United States is indeed still alive, at 95 years old.
Like the writer Mark Twain who had suffered the same mistreatment by a news agency in 1897, Mr. Chomsky could therefore have declared after seeing his own obituary: “The announcement of my death is greatly exaggerated. »
Rather, it was his wife who rectified the vital fact. She responded simply: “No, that’s not true” to a question from the Associated Press which verified the information, as it should.
Noam Chomsky, renowned linguist and strong critic of US domestic and foreign policy, has lived partly in Brazil since 2015. He was hospitalized a year after suffering a heart attack, Valeria Chomsky explained to the press agency. The Beneficência Portuguesa Hospital in Sao Paulo issued its own press release to explain that its famous patient had returned home.
The false news was announced on the X network quite early on Tuesday and picked up by some reputable media outlets. The old left-wing British weekly The New Statesman and the American Socialist Magazine Jacobin both relayed the information, obviously without verifying it, accompanied by obituaries.
Jacobin blocked access to the affected page for a few minutes before rebroadcasting it, changing its title from: “We remember Noam Chomsky” to “Let’s celebrate Noam Chomsky”.
The New Statesman backed down by stopping the broadcast of a tribute text written by the former Minister of Finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis.
The Diario de Centro site, entangled in the false news, also corrected the information broadcast about the death of the linguist.
It is still ironic to see that one of the harshest critics of the news media has thus tasted their worst medicine.
“RIP Noam Chomsky, you wrote books to question the media and a single anonymous tweet declares you dead,” tweeted one user of the network. Another had this amusing expression: “Noam Chomsky died as he lived: while being alive. »