At least this is what I suspect.
Newspaper of reference, El Pais of Madrid, which is to Spanish what Le Monde is to French or the NYT to English has been scammed. Tweets today announced that they were going to publish a picture of sick Chavez (why? to begin with). That picture was of Chavez supposedly intubated.
Unfortunately within minutes someone showed a video from a Mexican surgery training or something to that effect where the picture came from.
At this typing El Pais has not made a retraction yet but the link to the article has ceased to function though the Latin America news page still carries the header.
I suppose lots of explanations are going to follow. However one thing is certain, international newspapers should show the restraint of Venezuelan bloggers like yours truly, not to obsess with Chavez whereabouts because well, those whereabouts are used for political manipulation by Cuba and his local allies inside the Chavez regime. Even Bocaranda has shown no picture...
Now, in a few days, when and if Chavez dies, or when and if another coup happens in Venezuela, any comment from El Pais will be ridiculed by the regime, thus silencing it at least in the eyes of the chavista suckers.
I will, of course keep reading El Pais in spite of that apparent blunder, but I expect a real explanation real, real soon... PS: by the way, El Pais has done some serious budget cuts that resulted in part in stopping the international commentary I participated in. Looks like El Pais lost more than just that forum with those cuts....
Below the page as it appeared a few minutes ago.
UPDATE
El Pais has just announced that it was withdrawing the picture of "Chavez" from its web site and recalling the distribution of its newspaper. It apologizes because it needs to do a new edition, that not all will have the paper in a timely way tomorrow. The explanation is not too good as El Pais claims that they accepted that picture from a news agency that they still do not name... I suppose that for legal reasons they may want to withhold the name for the time being but they need to expose whomever conned them if they want to leave this major mess behind fast. I trust they will.
The tweet that poked my page a few minutes ago
EL PAÍS retira de su web una falsa foto de Hugo Chávezhttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/01/24/actualidad/1359002703_817602.html … vía @el_pais
Boy, that photo of an intubated "Chávez" sure has gained legs. It keeps popping up. Someone sure isn't thinking when they post an image of an intubated man in the supine position when he's had a vertebrectomy.
ReplyDeleteTu lo que tienes es que traducir lo primero que escribister y mandarselo al director...
ReplyDeleteAll you have to do is translate what you wrote a the top of this page and send it to the editor of stupid paper that by the way sponsored Chavez in the beginning and is a mouthpiece for the PSOE.
Saludos
Ya El Pais corrigio, y le va a costar una bola de billete por los periodicos que se imprimieron y no se venderan.
DeleteEn cuanto a su aporte a Chavez, El Pais ha sido el primer periodico importante a nivel mundial en criticar a Chavez. Y si Chavez gano no fue por El Pais aunque posiblemente su apoyo ayudo en conseguir la plata que le dio BBVU a Chavez para su campaña.
No nos amarguemos por eso, El Pais ha criticado a Chavez mucho mas, muchismo mas que lo ha apoyado. Si fuese por eso, el unico periodoco que nunca apoyo a Chavez fue El Universal. No se ni siquiera si se peude decir lo mismo de ABC o El Mundo....
Disculpas por los "typos"
ReplyDeleteAll I can say, Is that they should have at least think twice before printing the first page of a renown newspaper with the picture of a man supposedly intubated, it doesn't matter who the person is, what difference does it make! there are boundaries coño!!
ReplyDeleteThey lost the respect of so many, not because they did this, which in and of itself is bad for so many reasons, but because they let themselves to be scammed and screwed this way, and so they reach new low from which they'll not be able to recover for a long time, and they need to do a lot of damage control.
BTW, I saw similar pictures and videos, posted on my FB and in the FB of some friends, days ago, so I'm wondering if this was an orchestrated plan to screw the minds of many people as possible, even amongs Chavistas, maybe to avoid the need to publish a proof of life with photos or videos.
Now they can hold that, while whining about the evil that represents the international media, meanwhile they continue to sign executive orders, appoint ministers and so forth and so on, on behalf of a man and his proverbial Schrödinger's cat state.
Oh boy this is a disaster