Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1991

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Communication

Major Professor

M. Mark Miller

Abstract

Crisis events are disruptive times in the lives of communities and companies. The news media coverage of a crisis event and the organizational response to that same event are asserted in the communications literature to flow in well ordered and predictable phases. This study examines issues associated with a crisis event, the Exxon Valdez disaster, to test the orderliness of those phases. Two wire services (AP Wire and Business Wire), three issues types (economic issues, environmental issues and legal issues), two informational source types (Exxon sources and non-Exxon sources), three phases (pre-crisis, crisis, and crisis resolution phases) and two windows of opportunity (the first week and the second week of the crisis) are used to test specific predictions about how characterizations of crisis events should unfold over time in the media. Using a binary coding strategy and categorical analysis of variance procedures, tests are made of specific propositions concerning relationships among these variables. Fifteen individual hypotheses were tested. Hypothesis tests were divided into three categories: 1) a test for the window of opportunity, 2) 11 tests of phase, issue, and source interactions, and 3) tests for wire service differences. Only four of these hypotheses were found to be significant. And only three of the hypotheses were significant in the predicted direction. Chi-square tests demonstrate that Exxon is found to have missed the window of opportunity in the first week of the crisis event. The public relations literature leads one to expect that organizational crisis communications plans come into play at the outset of a crisis event to control the flow of information to the media. Organizational sources would be expected to be associated with this information flow in greater frequency than non-organizational sources. This study was unable to find a significant difference between the two source types in the first two weeks of the AP coverage of the crisis event. None of the 11 hypotheses were found to be true in the phase interactive hypothesis tests. This result may be due to the flawed assumption that organizational communicators are highly successful in their placement of organizational sources in the news media. Non-organizational sources are more frequent in AP Wire coverage of the Exxon Corporation whether before, immediately after, or during the Exxon Valdez crisis event. Maximum-likelihood analysis of variance procedures in two waves do show that: 1) Non-Exxon corporation source citations are found to dominate AP Wire newscopy regardless of phase, 2) Exxon Corp. was found to be reactive to the crisis event and not proactive, and 3) Issue types were found to interact in ways that can have serious and detrimental effects on the media coverage of organizations in crisis. AP Wire and Business Wire were found to significantly differ in their coverage of issue types during the third phase of the crisis event. AP wire was found to be much more likely to mention environmental, legal, and economic issues in news copy than Business Wire. AP Wire and Business Wire were found to significantly differ in their coverage of issue types during the third phase of the crisis event. AP wire was found to be much more likely to mention environmental, legal, and economic issues in news copy than Business Wire. This result suggests issue avoidance by Exxon Corporation. The study was limited by: 1) the size of the Business Wire sample, 2) the issue term selection process, and 3) dependence on the raw frequencies of single words to assess the significance of the issue categories in the analysis. A variety of research needs to be conducted with the source names list and with the terms in the issue categories developed for the study. The advent of computerized content analysis in the past decade has resulted in the ability to search for very complex and lengthy ideational constructs in text. This will have the result of enriching theory in the media coverage of organizations.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS