Spain's El Pais apologises for false Hugo Chavez photo

[Eugene]

Source: BBC

24 January 2013 Last updated at 09:25 GMT

Spain's El Pais apologises for false Hugo Chavez photo

Spain's El Pais newspaper has apologised after publishing a photo of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez which it said has turned out to be a fake.

The photo shows a man in hospital with a tube in his mouth and was printed on the front page with the headline: "the secret of Chavez's illness".

The Venezuelan government called the photo "grotesque".

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El Pais has withdrawn the photo from its website and collected copies of the first edition of Thursday's paper from newsstands, the BBC's Tom Burridge reports from Madrid.

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Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21176915

[naaman fletcher]

1. news agency?

The paper said in a statement that it had obtained the image from a news agency but that it had not been able to independently verify the date, location or circumstances of the photo.

Which news agency?

The fact that they are not saying, and that no other paper apparently ran the photo suggests that is bullshit... that some asshole just sent it to them and they ran with the big scoop.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Here's the photo!

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Girish Gupta January 24, 2013 14:19
Hunger for Chavez news prompts media mishaps

Spanish daily El Pais irks Venezuela with front-page false Chavez photo of a hospitalized man with a breathing tube.

~snip~
Venezuelan Information Minister Ernesto Villegas this morning tweeted various articles about El Pais’s mistake, a link to the newspaper's own style guide as well as his own criticism.
“Would El Pais publish a similar photo of some European leader? Of its director? Yellow journalism is valid if the victim is a South American revolutionary,” he tweeted, accusing the paper with violating its own editorial standards “to attack Venezuela."

~snip~

After Miami’s Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald reported that Chavez had been rushed to a hospital for kidney failure in September 2011, he invited the press to his presidential palace. The president emerged with a baseball in hand and tossed it back and forth with aides before lecturing the assembled press for two hours

Last March, London’s Independent was forced to run an embarrassing correction on an article that alleged Chavez had “indulged in a 'homophobic rant' against a political rival,” according to the paper’s admission. Venezuela’s ambassador to Britain described the error as “absurd and libelous.”

European media have come under criticism in other Latin American countries. In Cuba, the Prisa group that owns El Pais is frequently attacked for its perceived bias against the region's leftist governments.

More:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/venezuela/130124/hugo-chavez-el-pais-photo-cuba