Hugo Chavez presents Barack Obama with a book by Eduardo Galeano

It was a shocking moment, if only because it was the sort of thing that no one would have thought to do with our previous president: When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez met President Barack Obama on Staurday, he gave him a book.

The book in question was notable — Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano — but the whole thing — Chavez + Obama + book — provided a good opportunity to see how the cultural media has or hasn’t changed four months out of the Bush miasma. So what’s the story that came out of it? That the book immediately shot up the Amazon bestseller list (to number 2 as of this writing), according to a very brief Associated Press wire story, which calls it “astounding.”

It’s business as usual in other ways, too. For example, the AP reports that “The English hardcover edition is listed as out of print.” Hmm, could that be because … it’s in paperback? Which a reporter would have know if they had, you know, looked at the book’s Amazon page … which is where you would go to see, um, its ranking … which was, you know, the point of the story? Oh well. More sigh-inducing, the sans-byline AP report seems even more astounded (or is it horrified?) by the news it feels compelled to deliver in a dramatic last line: the book is “a favorite among leftists.”

Oh, NOW they want to smear a president with ideology ….

Well, at least the results on Amazon can be read as people paying no heed to the mainstream media that sold them out for eight years. (Call me crazy, but: another theory as to why news papers are croaking?) What’s more, it’s the second time Chavez has had the Oprah effect on an American book: As a BBC News story reminds us, when he praised Noam Chomsky in a 2006 appearance before the UN General Assembly, Chomsky’s sales also exploded.