BTN News: Yesterday Noam Chomsky’s reported death was widely reported as the truth, but – as his wife Valeria Wasserman Chomsky reported Tuesday – that is simply not the case. The 95-year-old linguist and activist was in a hospital in Brazil after suffering a stroke last year. Now though, he has been released to continue recovering at home.
In an email to The Associated Press, Valeria Wasserman Chomsky called the report “fake,” in blunt terms dismissing the allegation without elaborating. She told the AP last week Chomsky, 86, had suffered a stroke and was being treated at the Beneficencia Portuguesa hospital in São Paulo. Broadus was discharged from the hospital Tuesday, and he will return home to undergo continued treatment.
Earlier in the day, the name Noam Chomsky started trending on X (which we used to call Twitter) as misinformation that he had died in the past few hours was boosted across various platforms very quickly. Publications like Jacobin and The New Statesman even ran obituaries for Chomsky. This led Jacobin to change their headline from “Remembering Noam Chomsky” to “Celebrating Noam Chomsky” and The New Statesman to remove an essay from former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis entirely.
Since 2015, the Chomskys have lived in Brazil. Noam Chomsky has held a number of titles in his time – a veritable Professor Emeritus of the United States, teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the ministrator of a global space of the dialect of the U.S. Empire. He joined the faculty in 2017 at the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The circulation of these false reports has brought into focus the importance of acquiring such news with caution and the need for verification in the days of social media, which can help spread misinformation, rapidly. Whilst Noam Chomsky may have bent the rules a little, his work on linguistics and political discourse is still relevant today, and his commitment to intellectual and social causes resonates with a great many people.
