Where is the virus? Political manipulation of the language about coronavirus

Moura, H.

In this paper, I try to show that some radical right and left-wing political discourses manipulate the language about the coronavirus, in order to sustain their biased and baseless claims about the Covid-19 pandemic. This kind of manipulation fits the view that political manipulation of language is based on a fusion of partial truths and whole lies (Katukani, 2018). The data was collected from the Brazilian far-right news website criticanacional.com.br and from the book The sovereign virus?, written by the postmodern leftist philosopher Donatella di Cesare. Data analysis shows that the most note worthy manipulation found in these political discourses is the concealment of relevant information about where the virus is. The large majority of sentences about the virus found in the corpus offers no hint where the virus is located or how it is spreading. It will be shown that this concealment favors the baseless claims of both radical political discourses. In order to make a comparison with the results from those studies, I collected data from the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo. The finding is that the sentences from this newspaper are much more precise about where the virus is. © 2021 Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos. All rights reserved.