Transcript: China and US blame each other, Russia muddles narrative with misinformation re Covid-19

Another entry in  The Covid-19 Transcripts
From Al Jazeera Listening Post April 4, 2020

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Three super powers are waging an information war over the coronavirus. 
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Hello I'm Richard Gizbert and you're watching The Listening Post.  For some governments the battle against Covid-19 is being fought on multiple fronts, medical informational and ideological. 

As they've been isolating their populations to keep the coronavirus contained, some powerful governments are simultaneously waging a worldwide war of perceptions, laying out how the pandemic happened, where the responsibilities lie, and which country should lead the fight against it.

China is out to shift the narrative from its initially slow response the way its censors kept a lid on the story, to a collective effort since then to bring down the infection rate. Beijing has also borrowed a page from Moscow's playbook using mainstream and social media platforms to spread conspiracy theories and muddle perceptions.

In Washington a campaign to brand Covid-19 the Chinese virus is being led by the man at the top, President Donald Trump.  This story has grown into a debate about competing ideologies, a global one played out through the media of what the world will look like once the pandemic is over, and which political system, which super power, will be best placed to lead.

Our starting point this week is the geo political battle for the narrative of Covid-19.

Three super powers are waging an information war over the coronavirus.  The American version of the story, Covid-19 is the Wuhan virus, it's Chinese in origin.  The government there failed to act quickly enough and the blame for the pandemic lies solely at China's door.

Donald Trump: (clip) I talk about the Chinese virus and I mean it, that's where it came from.

Beijing's counter narrative, Americans may have placed the virus in Wuhan.

No one really knows.

Moscow meanwhile is taking a backseat while allowing its media apparatus to amplify theories, including conspiracy theories, that pit Washington and the west against Beijing.  Sitting in the middle of it all, the United Nations.  Where the secretary general is playing UN Peacekeeper.

Antonio Guterres:  Our common enemy is the virus, but our enemy is also a very insurgent misinformation. So to overcome this virus, we need to urgently promote fact and science, and hope and solidarity over despair and division.

Emerson Brooking: The UN Secretary General has called out misinformation surrounding coronavirus as a global threat and I absolutely agree.  WHEN any government makes a bold proclamation about the origin of the virus or who's really to blame, they should be required to backup their allegations, and those allegations should be judged not just be media but by people who might be critical. We're at a point of extreme danger regarding misinformation and rising international tensions amid a global pandemic. 

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We're at a point of extreme danger regarding misinformation and rising international tensions amid a global pandemic. 

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Mark Galeotti: This is more a case study of how the modern information environment works, but generally speaking the misinformation is not being created by Moscow, it's not being created by China, it's being created by humanity as a whole.  There are now no more gatekeepers, no more people who can control it, anyone who has a blog, a twitter feed, an Instagram feed, is a media outlet in their own right.  This means all kinds of eye catching nonsense emerges, the issue is how in ways its curated and controlled.

Richard Gizbert;  Of  the media super powers, China exerts the most top down information control, that was painfully and lethally evident in the early days of the outbreak when they downplayed the real story in Wuhan. The message now is about unity, the effort to flatten the curve, and as always the leadership of President Xi.

However, for international audiences on another aspect of the Covid-19 story, the blame game.  Beijing's propaganda model is evolving, mutating, and looking more like Moscow's.  

Bethany Allen: In February we started seeing something completely different, a clear attempt to emulate the Russian strategy of destabilizing the information environment, which was the use of Twitter accounts to spread conspiracy theories, things that there is absolutely no fact based evidence for. 

For example the idea that the coronavirus originated in a U.S. military lab and then planted on Wuhan.  This was picked up by several accounts.

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In the geopolitical battle over narratives and the coronavirus, Russia is also in the mix.  A study produced by the European Union last month cited eighty instances of Russian media publishing misinformation designed to quote aggravate the health crisis in the West.   

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Eighty instances of Russian media publishing misinformation designed to aggravate the health crisis in the West cited.

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Richard Gizbert: The outlets involved however aren’t always Russia's media players and their content seems designed for external audiences.  Sputnik's German language site quoted an alleged expert saying that washing hands was useless against preventing infections and RenTV called Covid-19 a bio weapon created in an American lab and smuggled into China.  [several reporters connect the spread of disinformation to social media ]

Richard Gizbert:  America's misinformation problem starts at the White House and extends to President Trump's cohorts at Fox News. Both institutions initially downplayed the threat suggesting there were politics at play before admitting the obvious.

Another American institution, the New York Times, examined the foreign disinformation story this past week relying heavily as the New York times is wont to do on unnamed U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats.

The Times reported that both China and Russia are out to undermine their adversary the U.S., rather than addressing public criticism of their own problems, which is precisely what the Trump administration tends to do when questioned on the slow U.S. response to the pandemic.

Wolf Blitzer:  Didn't the United States as a whole get off to a late start?

Vice President Mike Pence: Well the- the reality that is that, uh, we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming.
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Watch entire episode of Listening Post from Al Jazeera
 https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-geopolitical-battle-for-covid-19.html
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NOTE:  The clips I transcribe for The Covid-19 Transcripts project contain information that I don't think is available in print anywhere else. Please show your appreciation by clicking some cash into my PayPal account through button at top of left hand column.)
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I wrote my take on the USS Roosevelt here  https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2020/04/what-sense-does-this-make-mario-cuomo.html
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Posted by Kay Ebeling
Producer, City of Angels Blog
the city of angels is everywhere