Chyron of the Day: What’s The Name Of This Rambling Libyan Leader?

All cable news networks, all morning:

The leader of Libya has now completed a more than 90-minute speech at the United Nations, with CNN, Fox News and MSNBC taking it in full (well almost – FNC cut out a few minutes before). It was rambling, accusatory and at times fairly incoherent. But now we must ask the important question – how do we spell this guy’s name?

You’ll get three different answers from the three different American cable news networks. CNN is going with “Gadhafi”, Fox News is using “Qaddafi” and MSNBC went with “Khaddafy”. That’s right – they don’t even start with the same letter.

Apparently this same problem kept coming up the last time the leader of Libya was in the news – around 1986. Here are a couple resources that show the media confusion back then, with far more potential ways to spell the name. ABC News’ Jake Tapper just tweeted: “Library of Congress recognizes 112 different spellings of the name of the Libyan leader.

And Saturday Night Live presented some other options a few years earlier.

It may be confusing which is the proper way to spell his name (it seems we’re using “Muammar Gaddafi” here at Mediaite, but that could change any minute), but it isn’t nearly as confusing as his speech. Here’s a taste of the crazy:

Thanks to Jennifer from Detroit for the tip.

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