The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Thomas Peter/Reuters.
How do we approach news stories that talk to one another without saying a word at all? Today we look at two Chinese and U.S. news articles which both demand information from the other nation about the origins of the Covid-19 virus. The problem is that both authors and publishers have a very different set of ideas as to where the virus may have come from. Yet at the same time, both insist on a similar set of goals that include tracking the virus’ origins, demanding transparency for international investigations into national research institutes, and more.
This propaganda workshop asks how we can view two pieces of very different propaganda and put them in conversation. We will work out how best to understand two sets of information that talk about the same subject (origins of the Sars-Cov-2 novel coronavirus) with almost no informational overlap whatsover.
Our first article was published in the Washington Post by the Washington Post Editorial Board on February 5th, 2021, titled “We’re still Missing the Origin Story of this Pandemic. China is Sitting on the Answers.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavirus-origins-mystery-china/?arc404=true
Our second article was written by Xinhua, a Chinese state-run news agency, and published across a variety of Chinese media platforms, including China Daily, People’s Daily USA, and CCTV News on January 21st, 2021. It is titled “An Explosion in Hot (Internet) Searches: This American Base Can’t Hide the Virus.” The following version comes from the People’s Daily USA
Original: http://usa.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0122/c241376-32008704.html
Last, the propaganda workshop itself available for download:
Donald Santacaterina 