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The C word: managing crisis in the modern media landscape

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The C word: managing crisis in the modern media landscape

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THE C WORD:
MANAGING CRISIS IN THE MODERN MEDIA LANDSCAPE

by

Ashley Karp

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS (STRATEGIC PUBLIC RELATIONS)

December 2015

Copyright 2015 Ashley Karp

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
...................................................................................................................
3

LIST OF FIGURES
.................................................................................................................................
4

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
....................................................................................................................
5

INTRODUCTION
...................................................................................................................................
6

CHAPTER I: CRISIS & ITS MANAGEMENT
............................................................................
12

DEFINING CRISIS
...................................................................................................................................................
12

CRISIS MANAGEMENT
..........................................................................................................................................
17

CHAPTER II: THE ROLE OF PERCEPTION
............................................................................
25

THE THOMAS THEOREM
......................................................................................................................................
25

CRISIFICATION
........................................................................................................................................................
29

CHAPTER III: THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA
..............................................................................
31

NEWS FRAMING THEORY
.....................................................................................................................................
31

GATEKEEPING
........................................................................................................................................................
33

AGENDA SETTING
..................................................................................................................................................
37

CHAPTER IV: LITERATURE REVIEW
......................................................................................
40

CRISIS TYPOLOGIES
..............................................................................................................................................
40

CRISIS COMMUNICATION THEORIES
................................................................................................................
47

Corporate Apologia
...........................................................................................................................................
48

Image Repair Theory
.........................................................................................................................................
50

Situational Crisis Communication Theory
................................................................................................
52

STAGED APPROACH TO CRISIS MANAGEMENT
..............................................................................................
62

CHAPTER V: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
..........................................................................
68

INTERVIEW METHODOLOGY
...............................................................................................................................
68

CASE STUDY METHODOLOGY
............................................................................................................................
69

CONTENT ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY
...............................................................................................................
70

CONTENT ANALYSIS RESEARCH QUESTIONS
..................................................................................................
75

CHAPTER VI: GENERAL MOTORS CRISIS CASE STUDY
................................................
76

TIMELINE OF EVENTS
...........................................................................................................................................
76

CHARACTERIZING THE CRISIS
............................................................................................................................
80

CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION EFFORTS
............................................................................
83

CONSEQUENCES AND ENDURING DAMAGE
...................................................................................................
87

CHAPTER VII: CONTENT ANALYSIS FINDINGS
.................................................................
91

PREDOMINANT FRAMES IN GM’S CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS (RQ1)
..................................
91

PREDOMINANT FRAMES IN MEDIA COVERAGE OF GM RECALL CRISIS (RQ1)
....................................
92

CRISIS MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES EMPLOYED BY GM (RQ2)
.................................................................
93

CHAPTER VIII: KEY LESSONS FROM INTERVIEW
...........................................................
96

CHAPTER IX: CONCLUSION
......................................................................................................
107

BIBLIOGRAPHY
...............................................................................................................................
109

APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
.............................................................................
118

2

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my profound gratitude to my Thesis Committee Chair,
Jennifer Floto, for being my voice of reason and for talking me off a ledge when I was at
my wit’s end. To Eric Miller, thank you for inspiring me to write this thesis. It quite
literally would not have been possible without you. Burghardt Tenderich, thank you for
trudging through the 100+ pages of this volume. Your class was where I began my
journey at USC and first felt challenged; it is only fitting that you are a part of its
completion. To my parents, thank you for your endless love and support and for allowing
me the opportunity to attend the University of Southern California. I am a better, stronger
and more complete person for it. Lastly, to Daniel Levy, thank you for your
encouragement, patience, and wisdom, and for the immense privilege of being your wife.

3

List of Figures
FIGURE 1: COOMBS’ CRISIS TYPE MATRIX .................................................................... 45
FIGURE 2: GM TWEET FROM SAMPLING PERIOD ........................................................ 72
FIGURE 3: FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION OF GM FRAMES ........................................... 91
FIGURE 4: FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION OF MEDIA FRAMES .................................... 93
FIGURE 5: FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTION OF GM REPAIR STRATEGIES .................. 95

4

Executive Summary
We live in a world where crisis looms around every corner. Or so it seems. This
thesis is an effort to make sense of the staggering ubiquity of crisis narratives in the mass
media, particularly in the age of social media. More specifically, it will explore whether
the propensity for crisis has increased; if we, as a global society, are guilty of overusing
the term; or if it is a case of a little from column A, a little from column B. Furthermore,
through a case study, content analysis and interview methodology, as well as a thorough
literature review, this paper will attempt to synthesize the volumes of existing research on
organizational crisis, expose the crisis concept as a social construction, and examine the
social, ethical and political consequences of proclaiming situations or issues as crises.

5

Introduction
The Ebola crisis. The Sony hack. The GM recalls. Malaysia Airlines flights 370
and 17. The Ferguson riots. Donald Sterling’s NBA ban. Ray Rice, domestic violence
and the NFL. The Target data breach. ISIS. “We live in a world seemingly awash in
crisis.”
1
Indeed, using only the headline-making crises of the past few years, Billy Joel
would have enough creative material for an encore to “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” While
crisis appears to be a permanent, pervasive and defining feature of the modern human
condition, the question that remains is: why? Has the propensity for crisis increased; are
we, as a global society, guilty of overusing the term; or is it a case of a little from column
A, a little from column B? The aim of this paper is to arrive at some basic truth
approximating an answer.
It is difficult to dispute that the risk of crisis has increased, both in frequency and
severity, due to several developments. First, organizational and corporate reputations are
more important, yet also more precarious, than ever before. In the post-Enron world,
public and private institutions alike are held to high standards of ethical conduct and
social responsibility. Accordingly, society’s tolerance for those that violate these
expectations has fallen immensely, contributing to the perceived prevalence of crisis.
Second, we depend on an ever-growing number of institutions, which has the effect of
increasing our individual exposure to organizational disruption.
2
For example, twenty
years ago, the Internet was a mystery, cell phones were a luxury, and Starbucks was just
beginning to weave its way into the cultural fabric of society. As these developments
became taken for granted, so too did our reliance on the institutions that provide them.

1
Alex Khasnabish, “Anti-Crisis by Janet Roitman (Review),” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 569.
2
Matthew W. Seeger, Timothy L. Sellnow and Robert R. Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication: Moving from Crisis to Opportunity,
3
rd
edition, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014), 14.

6

Third, the rapid pace of global information transmission, hastened by advances in modern
communication technologies and the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, has made the
world and the crises that occur within it more visible and well known. Finally, “as we
move closer to a truly global society, the incidents on one continent can create a crisis an
ocean away.”
3

An alternative explanation for this phenomenon is a tendency to egregiously
overstate the incidence of crisis, particularly among the mass media, for whom crisis-
mongering has become something of an international pastime. They appear to be
suffering from a crisis of imagination with regard to the labeling of organizational
problems. Nonetheless, their propensity for “crying crisis” is hardly benign. As Aesop
made abundantly clear, just like the boy who cried wolf, one can only cry crisis for so
long before the act of doing so loses efficacy and the word itself becomes essentially
devoid of meaning. If everything is labeled a crisis, then nothing truly is, for there will
inevitably come a time when crisis fatigue ensues and society ceases to pay any attention.
Thus, “we can only conclude that the concept of crisis is itself in crisis.”
4

The overuse of crisis as a catchall term for any sort of organizational problem
regardless of severity is not without consequences. As Kathleen Fearn-Banks points out,
“public relations professionals often say, ‘I have a crisis every day’.”
5
Yet, in broadly
applying the “c-word” to any situation that could be perceived as difficult, such
exaggerations at once inflate and deflate, overvalue and devalue the utility of crisis as an
analytical tool and linguistic signifier. Over time, through overuse and misuse, the word
crisis has come to possess all of the connotations and meanings of its strongest and, at the

3
Ibid.
4
Barbara B. Stern, Representing Consumers: Voices, Views, and Visions (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 368.
5
Kathleen Fearn-Banks, Crisis Communications: A Casebook Approach (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 2.
7

same time, weakest applications. Moreover, “overuse might lead us to bend over
backwards and fall into euphemism—calling a grave matter “a little difficult.”
6
In fact, it
has become common practice for organizations to use weaker and less pejorative terms
when referring to crises, for example, when mass layoffs are branded as restructuring, or
when General Motors labeled the deadly ignition switch defect a “customer convenience
issue.”
Thus, it may be concluded that, as a concept, crisis has evolved to such an extent
that it longer means what it once did. More specifically, crisis has simultaneously
undergone semantic drift, genericism, and ultimately meaninglessness. Semantic drift can
be said to occur when the meaning of a word is altered due to careless or even ignorant
usage, whereas genericism refers to the process through which a term loses precision and
becomes vague or borderless in its meaning.
7
So while crisis used to denote a particular
kind of severe problem, today it commonly describes any type of problem. Finally, the
interplay of these aforementioned semantic transformations has resulted in a death of
meaning.
8
That is, through repeated overuse and misuse, crisis ceases to mean anything at
all.
These processes also blur the distinction between real crises and lesser problems,
as these terms and their many imperfect synonyms are frequently used interchangeably.
This is a cause for concern since they not only possess wholly different meanings, but
also dictate significantly different management responses. This idea may be best
explained by way of an analogy. It would make little sense to sound a three-alarm siren

6
Todd Gitlin, “A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority, and Deference” (presentation, Journalism in Crisis
Conference, University of Westminster, London, May 19, 2009).
7
Henning, Jeffrey, “Meaning Change,” Model Languages: The Newsletter Discussing Newly Imagined Words for Newly Imagined
Worlds 1, no. 4 (1995): 88-102.
8
Ibid.

8

and alert the fire department in response to a toppled-over candle. Conversely, attempting
to snuff a forest fire with a lowly household extinguisher would be equally impractical.
Thus, accurately assessing and diagnosing a given situation may mean the difference
between success and failure and an efficient or wasteful use of precious resources. “If
there is a crisis, then (again by definition) ordinary action has proved itself inadequate
and extraordinary action is either explicitly or implicitly called for.”
9

Nevertheless, it is not only the concept of crisis that is in turmoil. The existing
repertoire of crisis management literature is in equally dire straits, falling woefully short
of practical or even analytical utility and offering rather generic prescriptions. Indeed,
“much of the crisis management research today focuses on the technical aspects of
dealing with crises. The majority of this literature explains the importance of
implementing a crisis plan and the strategies involved in that planning. Other research
deals with the formation of crisis management teams and their relevance.”
10
Additional
recommendations derived from the crisis management catalogue include pre-assigning
responsibilities and tasks, selecting and training spokespeople, conducting drills and
simulations, identifying potential crisis scenarios and preemptively establishing key
audiences and messages.
11
Moreover, crisis experts advocate transparent, consistent and
timely communication.
Still, crisis management plans may not be as relevant and useful in practice as
they are in theory, especially since modern crises often cannot be predicted, nor can the
unorthodox response strategies they demand be predetermined. Accordingly, there are
other factors that influence the outcome of crises, which may explain why certain

9
Norman Podhoretz, “The Idea of Crisis,” Commentary Magazine, November 1970.
10
John M. Penrose, “The Role of Perception in Crisis Planning,” Public Relations Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 156.

11
W. Timothy Coombs, “Crisis Management and Communications,” Institute for Public Relations, January 6, 2011,
http://www.instituteforpr.org/crisis-management-and-communications.
9

organizations have experienced management failure despite extensive crisis plans, while
others lacking in preparedness are lauded as success stories. Unfortunately, the lion’s
share of crisis management research fails to consider the perceptual dimension of crises,
however, “when dealing with corporate crisis and crisis management, the need for
considering not only the technical issues but also the human and social dimension is
paramount.”
12

The way in which organizations and their stakeholders perceive crises represents
a critical gap in the literature, particularly since this may well influence their subsequent
evaluations, judgments, planning and, most importantly, actions. On one end,
organizational perceptions of events will influence whether or not these situations are
classified as crises, ultimately shaping how they are subsequently managed and affecting
their outcomes. Alternatively, the perceptions of the public and the media go a long way
toward defining a situation as a crisis. In other words, “If stakeholders believe an
organization is in crisis, a crisis does exist, and stakeholders will react to the organization
as if it is in crisis.”
13
Their reality of the situation becomes that of the organization.
Regrettably, examinations of these intangible aspects of crisis have been largely absent
from the literature.
In sum, through a case study, content analysis, and interview methodology, as
well as a thorough literature review, this paper will attempt to synthesize the volumes of
research on organizational crisis, uncover whether the language of crisis is mobilizing or
incendiary, expose the constructed nature of the crisis concept, examine what it means to

12
Ramona Pergel and Alexandros G. Psychogios, “Making Sense of Crisis: Cognitive Barriers of Learning in Critical Situations,”
Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy 1, no. 2 (2013): 183.
13
W. Timothy Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2015), 3.
10

proclaim crisis, and explore the “implicit limitations of a word so ubiquitous that it is
normally taken for granted.”
14

14
Scott McLemee, “Crisis and Critique,” Inside Higher Ed, December 4, 2013,
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/12/04/review-janet-roitman-anti-crisis.
11

Chapter I: Crisis & its Management
Defining Crisis
“Crisis” finds its etymological roots in two Ancient Greek terms: krino and
krisis.
15
In the 5
th
century BCE, both words had precise applications in medical
terminology and are believed to have been operationalized by the father of Western
medicine, Hippocrates.
16
Krino, a verb, meant to separate, choose, decide or judge,
whereas the noun krisis denoted “the turning point of a disease, or a critical phase in
which life or death was at stake and called for an irrevocable decision.”
17
Crisis was,
therefore, a decisive juncture in the lifecycle of an illness where a decision on a particular
course of action would effectively tip the scales in one way or another, determining a
positive or negative outcome. Since then, the term has expanded into every area of life,
evolving into a catchall expression of virtually any instance of unexpected hyperbolic
dysfunction or difficulty.
There is a widespread perception among crisis academics that in Chinese
language the Mandarin symbol for crisis, weiji, is composed of two characters: one
signifying danger, the other, opportunity.
18
People exposed to this apocryphal aphorism
infer that a crisis can be ultimately interpreted as a dangerous opportunity. While this is
an appealing notion, and one habitually proclaimed by commencement speakers, in
reality it amounts to nothing more than linguistic mythology or even wishful thinking.
Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of
Pennsylvania penned a compelling essay discrediting the “crisis as dangerous
opportunity” trope. He explains that the Mandarin word for crisis contains two syllables

15
Alex Khasnabish, “Anti-Crisis by Janet Roitman (Review),” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 570.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.

18
Victor H. Mair, “Danger + Opportunity ≠ Crisis,” Pinyin, September 2009, http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html.
12

that are expressed distinct characters, wēi and jī, respectively.
19
According to Mair, the
former syllable does, indeed, signify danger; however, the latter in no way conveys the
notion of opportunity as it is conventionally conceived.
20

In fact, the jī portion of the word means something more along the lines of a
crucial moment of change, for better or worse, which, coupled with the wēi or danger
element, makes the Chinese concept of crisis much closer to the sense of the word as it
was understood by Hippocrates and his disciples. The pervasiveness of this inaccurate
assertion is especially troubling since some researchers premise entire theories of crisis
management on its tenets. On this, Mair warns, “any would-be guru who advocates
opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his/her advice
will only compound the danger of the crisis.”
21
Thus, although opportunities may emerge
in certain crisis situations, they are not inherent to or inevitable byproducts of crises a
priori.
Today, two millennia since the inception of the concept, there is no single
universally accepted definition of crisis within the literature. Nevertheless, there is a
general consensus about what constitutes a crisis situation in organizational settings.
Despite the large diversity of crisis research, there are several theoretical similarities in
definitions of crisis, even in instances where they ostensibly appear quite different.
According to the preponderance of crisis texts, and a classic study by Hermann in
particular, a crisis can be said to exist if an unexpected and undesirable event or series of
events creates an environment of uncertainty and threatens an organization’s high-priority

19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.

21
Ibid.
13

goals such that immediate action is required.
22
Therefore, there are three characteristics
that demarcate crisis from other, less-aggravating situations, specifically: surprise, threat
and short response time.
23

The surprise element of crises stems from their non-routine nature, as well as their
consideration as low probability events. In terms of threat, crises are high-consequence
situations that jeopardize an organization’s business goals, such as profitability, growth,
market share, reputation and overall legitimacy, or its publicly-conferred right to exist.
Moreover, they can bring business operations to a grinding halt, for example, if a
manufacturing plant burns down, or the CEO dies suddenly, taking a closely guarded
trade secret to the grave. A crisis may also pose a threat to stakeholders outside of the
organization by affecting the entire industry of the afflicted organization or by
endangering public safety. Finally, with reference to the short response time engendered
by crisis events, they are situations characterized by a profound sense of urgency.
Fearn-Banks defines crisis as “a major occurrence with a potentially negative
outcome that affect the organization, company, or industry, as well as its publics,
products, services or good name.”
24
She also points out that a crisis represents a departure
from normal business operations and the status quo and, perhaps most importantly,
threatens the very existence and long-term viability of an organization or enterprise.
25
By
contrast, Heath posits a more straightforward definition of crisis as a “risk manifested.”
26

This account relies on the assumption that the warning signs of crisis can be detected
before the precipitating event, which only ensues when the risk factors are allowed to

22
Seeger, Sellnow and Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication, 6.
23
Ibid.
24
Christopher Galloway and Kwamena Kwanash-Aidoo, Public Relations Issues and Crisis Management (Melbourne: Cengage
Learning, 2005), 5.
25
Ibid.
26
Robert L. Heath and H. Dan O’Hair, Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 47.
14

develop and incubate unchecked. Organizations presented with the early warning signs of
a crisis may fail to take the appropriate actions to prevent its occurrence due to
inadequate risk perception, a lack of foresight, a breakdown in communication systems,
or all three.
It is also a useful exercise to narrow down the notion of a crisis by outlining what
it is not. A crisis is not a mere problem or special situation but rather implies a more
serious issue or disturbance. Mitroff presents the idea that crises have the potential to
affect the entirety of an organization.
27
Thus, it can be deduced that if the damage
inflicted by an alleged crisis can be contained or isolated within a discrete part of the
larger organization, it cannot be considered a crisis. For example, the death of a CEO
need not necessarily constitute a crisis IF a comprehensive succession plan is in place,
employees and other stakeholders are duly notified, and a qualified successor is properly
introduced. In this context, the organization will experience a temporary state of flux,
yes, but not a crisis. Coombs supports the contention that a crisis unsettles the
organization as a whole. In doing so, he offers an important distinction between crises
and incidents, as he views the latter as more minor and localized in nature.
28
To Coombs,
a crisis always causes more damage than an incident and therefore must be approached
with a greater degree of gravitas and caution.
Still, there is another dimension of crisis that is frequently overlooked by scholars.
Crises are often conceptualized as if they are objective phenomena that can be intelligibly
identified as they occur. Indeed, definitions of crisis within public relations lead one to
the belief that, in the presence of certain unambiguous crisis signifiers, one can confirm

27
Ian I. Mitroff, Managing Crises Before They Happen: What Every Executive and Manager Needs to Know about Crisis
Management (New York: AMACOM, 2001), 34.
28
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 3.
15

the existence of a crisis with a high degree of certainty. In doing so, these abstractions fail
to consider the intangible aspects of crises. Coombs’ operationalization of crises
overcomes this perilous oversight by accounting for the role of perception. While the
following quote is not a definition of crisis per se, it nevertheless highlights a critical
aspect of crisis and shifts the analytic lens from an organization-centric approach to a
stakeholder-centric approach. “If stakeholders believe an organization is in a crisis, a
crisis does exist, and the stakeholders will react to the organization as if it is in a crisis.”
29

Therefore, the perception of stakeholders matters more or as much as what
actually happened in defining an event as a crisis. In other words, crises are in the eyes of
the beholder; they are subjective and at times irrational phenomena. Of course, this isn’t
to say that in ascribing meaning to crisis and elevating an issue to crisis proportions
stakeholders, and the media in particular, distort or present an alternative interpretation of
reality. On the contrary, their perception or version of reality is the only one that is
relevant, as the following section will elucidate further. This provides an important lesson
for crisis managers; they must be able to observe the event from the perspective of their
stakeholders to accurately diagnose or interpret a given crisis situation.
The following definition is proposed as an abridged synthesis of the diverse,
competing perspectives on crisis: A crisis is the perception of a major, unexpected and
threatening event that has the potential to cause damage to an organization, its
reputation and key stakeholders and, if inadequately managed, can jeopardize its very
existence.

29
Ibid., 3.

16

Crisis Management
No organization, however large or small, is impervious to crisis. According to
Coombs and Holladay (2012), “it is no longer the question of whether a major disaster
will strike any organization, but only a question of when, how, what form it will take, and
who and how many will be affected.”
30
Consequently, if crises can strike at any time, it is
imperative that organizations prepare in advance for their potential and virtually
inevitable occurrence. This can be achieved through crisis management processes, which
comprise the wide range of strategic planning activities organizations engage in to
address crises, attenuate their impact, and reduce a portion of the risk and uncertainty
associated with these negative events. It is in this way that crisis management provides
organizations with a greater locus of control as they weather the highs and lows of the
market. Crisis management is therefore a form of self-preservation, a way of
safeguarding the invaluable organizational assets, goodwill and reputation that have been
painstakingly built up over time.
Today, the need for proactive crisis management has never been greater. Indeed,
crises have become a near permanent fixture of our everyday experience, as organizations
navigating the capricious, highly competitive and somewhat unforgiving global economy
are becoming more susceptible to crises than ever before. The incidence of crisis appears
to be increasing as corporations and non-profits alike succumb to newly established risk
factors. Perrow explains that, “as technology continues to advance and as our population
continues to grow, we are increasingly exposed to and affected by crises that we could
not have imagined 20 or 30 years ago.”
31
Several developments underline this trend.
First, over the past two decades, the value of a positive reputation has increased

30
W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay, The Handbook of Crisis Communication (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 261.
31
Seeger, Sellnow and Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication, 14.
17

significantly in response to growing public awareness about corporate behaviors and
actions, a corresponding demand for greater organizational transparency, higher
stakeholder expectations, and the public’s mass-scale publishing potential enabled by
social media. In addition, an organization’s reputation is also its key differentiator and
can be an inimitable source of a sustainable competitive advantage. “Favorable
reputations have been linked to attracting customers, generating investment interest,
attracting top employee talent, motivating workers, increasing job satisfaction, generating
more positive media coverage, and garnering positive comments from financial
analysts.”
32

A second, related point is that recent advancements in communication
technologies have forever changed the speed and ease with which messages are
transmitted, in addition to expanding their geographic reach. Consumers have an ever-
growing arsenal of communication tools that they can use to voice their opinions, feelings
and criticisms about corporations to a wide audience. More specifically, the equalizing
powers afforded by the Internet have emboldened organizational stakeholders to air their
grievances, particularly in instances of perceived misconduct. “When disgruntled
stakeholders strike a responsive chord and connect with other stakeholders online, a crisis
can occur.”
33
In such circumstances, the burden of proof is on the organization. It must
implement crisis management structures to challenge negative, unfounded assumptions
and rumors, prevent the escalation of crisis, and ultimately right the ship, so to speak.
A corollary of communications innovations in the Information Age and the advent
of the 24-hour news cycle is a smaller, more visible and decidedly interconnected world.

32
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 12.
33
Ibid., 13.
18

In practice, this means that events that may have gone under the radar only a decade ago
often become the subject of extensive media treatment and public scrutiny on a global
scale. “Crisis media coverage has become more aggressive, frequent, and widespread,
which increases the imperative for organizations to implement crisis communication
programs.”
34
In this context, crises become news within a matter of minutes of their
occurrence, often breaking before or as soon as they are discovered by the afflicted
organization itself. This leaves little time to develop crisis management measures and
materials from scratch, placing a high premium on preemptive planning as a means of
protecting an organization’s hard-earned reputational capital and priority goals.
Unfortunately, too many organizations view crisis management as the mere
development of a crisis plan, coupled with its implementation as needed. However, this is
seldom sufficient, and is only one of the many sine qua nons of crisis management.
“Crisis management has evolved from emergency preparedness, and drawing from that
base, comprises a set of four interrelated factors: prevention, preparation, response, and
revision.”
35
Prevention is frequently referred to as crisis mitigation, and includes all of
the actions taken on the part of the organization to avoid crises altogether.
36

Organizational scanning is a crucial component of crisis prevention, given that
identifying, anticipating and reducing risk factors and organizational vulnerabilities early
on can nullify inchoate crises before external stakeholders are any the wiser. This can be
easily accomplished by constructing monitoring systems designed to detect the early
warning signs of foreseeable crises.
In addition, crisis prevention usually involves more routine practices, such as

34
Alyson M. Teeter-Baker, “Constant Crisis: A Study of the U.S. Military's Crisis Communication Program,” (master’s thesis, San
Jose State University, 2008), 4.

35
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 5.
36
Ibid.
19

ongoing public relations efforts and consistent two-way communication with key internal
and external stakeholders, to build positive relationships that may be leveraged in times
of crisis.
37
“If the organization does not pursue public relations opportunities and
outreach during the good times, it can haunt the organization during a crisis when the
support of the media and public is most needed.”
38
Finally, crisis prevention may also
necessitate the adoption of more abstract tactics and actions, for example, establishing a
corporate culture and cultivating policies conducive to the free flow of information within
the organization.
39

Preparation is essential for the crises that cannot be entirely forestalled. It
encompasses the activities most commonly associated with crisis management, that is,
the creation of a crisis plan, establishing a crisis team with clear roles and responsibilities,
appointing a spokesperson, compiling a comprehensive list of the crises most likely to
affect the organization in question, drafting possible responses and message templates
and outlining important resources for use during a crisis event.
40
Moreover, another key
element of preparation is conducting training exercises and drills on an annual basis to
test the suitability of the existing crisis plan, revising and refining as needed.
41
Finally,
preparation also consists of “establishing metrics to define what scenarios constitute a
crisis and should consequently trigger the necessary response mechanisms.”
42

Response refers to the process of applying and executing all of the
aforementioned preparation elements in a crisis situation. The majority of the activities
that take place during the response stage of crisis management amount to crisis

37
Fearn-Banks, Crisis Communications, 8.
38
Teeter-Baker, “Constant Crisis,” 6-7.
39
Fearn-Banks, Crisis Communications, 8.

40
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 5.
41
Coombs, “Crisis Management and Communications.”
42
Michael Johnson, Business Consulting: What you Need to Know for IT Operations Management (Aspley, Queensland: Emereo,
2012), 248.
20

communication, aimed at limiting the extent of the damage to the organization’s
reputation. “In crafting the content of crisis communication, the aims of crisis
management – minimizing the damage, retaining responsiveness and rebuilding the
damaged image – should be considered, and the communication should be orientated
toward those goals.”
43
There are three fundamental and sequential categories of
information provided in crisis communication efforts, namely, instructing, adjusting and
internalizing.
Instructional information tells key publics affected by a given crisis how they
should react to protect themselves.
44
For example, stakeholders must be immediately
notified if they are expected to evacuate a threatened area or building, avoid eating
contaminated food products or take any other safety-related action. Information about
business continuity also falls under the banner of instructional information.
45
The
organization must inform stakeholders about how the crisis will impact business
operations and whether or not organizational leadership has devised a plan for a return to
normalcy.
46

Adjusting information helps stakeholders mentally cope with a crisis in the face of
uncertainly, chaos, and stress.
47
Part of this process involves filling the information
vacuum created by the crisis with the who, what, when, where and whys of the particular
incident. Furthermore, adjusting information reassures stakeholders that the organization
has the crisis under control and is taking action to avoid another one.
48
Expressions of
concern or sympathy for the victims of the crisis event are also considered forms of

43
Niedermeir, Franziska, “Facebook as an Instrument of Strategic Crisis Communication: A Content Analysis of the Nestlé Palm Oil
Crisis” (working paper, International Research Group on Crisis Communication, 2012), 4.
44
Coombs and Holladay, The Handbook of Crisis Communication, 164.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid.
21

adjusting information.
49
Lastly, internalizing information helps the crisis-afflicted
organization maintain its reputation and is what stakeholders use to formulate opinions.
50

As will be discussed later in greater detail, it is crucial for the organization to craft its
repair messages carefully and strategically, particularly since the strategies employed will
influence stakeholders’ perceptions of both the crisis and the organization. Furthermore,
the “response is very public during an actual crisis. An organization’s crisis management
response is frequently reported and critiqued in the news media.”
51

Finally, revision takes place once the crisis has ended and the organization is in
recovery. It is essentially a comprehensive evaluation of the organization’s crisis
management performance throughout the prevention, preparation and response phases.
52

Ultimately, organizational leadership determines what was done right and wrong, and this
information is transformed in actionable data and insight used to make meaningful policy
changes and improve or amend the crisis plan.
53
“In the wake of a crisis, organizational
decision makers adopt a learning orientation and use prior experience to develop new
routines and behaviors that ultimately change the way the organization operates.”
54
Thus,
theoretically, the more crises a given organization experiences, the better and more
evolved its crisis management systems become. In essence, it is an ongoing process but
should have a distinguishable beginning, middle and end.
The categorical disruption generated by a crisis highlights and magnifies the
inadequacy of the status quo.
55
It is in this way that the crisis management revision

49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.

51
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 5.
52
Ibid., 6.
53
Ibid.
54
Johnson, Business Consulting, 252.
55
Mark A. Cwiek, Gerald R. Ledlow and James A. Johnson, Community Preparedness and Response to Terrorism: Communication
and the Media (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005), 169.
22

process is by and large a learning experience. A failure to learn from crisis increases the
organization’s crisis susceptibility and, in particular, the likelihood that it will experience
a similar event in the future. “Revision is the development of an institutional or
organizational memory, which can improve the effectiveness of crisis management by
expanding the organization’s perception of crises and its response capacity.”
56

Developing this sort of memory is crucial, since it can be tempting to view a crisis as a
one-off aberration or exception, causing it to be quickly forgotten once recovery is
achieved. This results in a tendency to resist change and learning, which persists and
calcifies until such a point that the organization becomes a ticking time bomb, effectively
assuring its own destruction.
There are three primary objectives to be achieved through crisis management
processes. First, damage control or containment refers to the way in which crisis
management procedures can effectively minimize or limit the extent of harm inflicted by
the event, both to the organization and its stakeholders. The second goal is a return to
stasis or normal state of affairs, which ultimately requires skillful reputation repair and
deliberate efforts to regain institutional legitimacy. Lastly, organizational learning is an
oft-overlooked objective of crisis management but, as demonstrated above, can be
equally as beneficial as damage control and recovery when accomplished correctly,
especially if it allows for a more responsive and efficient crisis management system.
Crisis management ought to be viewed as an ongoing and iterative process. The
passive approach, in which organizations confronted by a crisis immediately assemble a
special, single-purpose task force, only to dismantle it and abandon all crisis management
efforts once the issue has been resolved is no longer tenable. The reactive method is akin

56
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 6.
23

to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound and simply creates an organizational
environment ripe for the growth and manifestation of crisis – a crisis incubator, so to
speak. Organizations must always be looking and planning ahead if they hope to thwart
or surmount potential crises.

24

Chapter II: The Role of Perception
The Thomas Theorem
The Thomas Theorem was posited by sociologists William Isaac Thomas and
Dorothy Swaine Thomas in 1928. It states “if men define situations as real, they are real
in their consequences.”
57
It is in this way that the Thomas Theorem perfectly
encapsulates the subjective notion of crisis. Crises are only significant to the extent that
they are considered genuine threats and disruptions to an organization or its key publics.
Thus, in the context of crisis management, the Thomas Theorem can be rephrased as
follows: if a situation is defined as a crisis, it will be a crisis in its consequences. It is the
perceptions of crises that influence subsequent behaviors, which are not bound to the
objective reality of a situation but to subjective interpretations of that experienced reality.
Moreover, if this is the case, any situation can serve as fodder for, or give rise to, the
manifestation of crisis, insofar as it is perceived as such.
When citizens or authorities define or declare a difficult situation a crisis, this
may have a decisive impact on the subsequent course of events. To call the
situation by such an evocative word may provoke hyper-vigilance and
overreaction, running from collective stress to escalatory decisions on the part of
the authorities (or organizational management). On the other hand, it may solicit
the collective energy and mobilize the emergent rules and norms necessary for
effective disaster and crisis management.
58

As this quote demonstrates, the activation of the Thomas Theorem can be either
beneficial or detrimental to organizations facing difficult situations, depending on the
circumstance. For organizations indeed confronted with situations of crisis proportions,

57
W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas, The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (New York: Knopf, 1928), 572.
58
Boin, Arjen, Louise K. Comfort and Uriel Rosenthal, Managing Crises: Threats, Dilemmas, Opportunities. (Springfield, IL:
Thomas Books, 2001) 12.

25

defining them as such may be advantageous since it can serve as a galvanizing force,
summoning the necessary resources and will to rectify the issue. On the other hand, those
organizations that jump to unnecessary conclusions of crisis may run the risk of inviting
the very scrutiny and negative attention they wish to avoid.
In crisis situations, the Thomas Theorem operates on two levels, the internal and
the external. In terms of the former, how organizations interpret a situation influences
their ultimate reaction. An ostrich-like diagnosis of a situation as neither a crisis nor a
problem will likely result in inaction. Thus, if organizational decision-makers discern that
a situation will be best managed by doing nothing and ignoring the issue altogether, it
goes to follow that they never considered it all that problematic to begin with. In
instances where a crisis goes entirely unnoticed, the do-nothing approach is not the result
of active organizational decision-making, but is instead an inevitable corollary of so-
called crisis blindness. In other words, the issue or possible crisis is not even a blip on the
organization’s proverbial radar; the failure to perceive a problem results in a
corresponding failure to do anything about it.
Conversely, if an organization does perceive something of a disruption but defines
it as a routine problem, it will address the matter with equally routine forces. In
concluding that a situation can be managed using everyday solutions, the organization
reveals that it has not perceived an issue of crisis proportions. To that end, Milburn
remarked that it is only appropriate to consider a situation a crisis if the solution cannot
be found in the existing repertoire of possible solutions; “if the answer exists in a book, it
is simply not a crisis.”
59
General Motors, for example, labeled the ignition switch defect

59
Robert S. Billings, Thomas W. Milburn and Mary Lou Schaalman, “A Model of Crisis Perception: A Theoretical and Empirical
Analysis,” Administrative Science Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1980): 305.
26

that resulted in numerous costly recalls and needless fatalities as a customer convenience
issue. Hence, despite a decade of awareness about the problem, it was never elevated to a
critical fix and what might have otherwise been a simple problem was allowed to fester
into a full-blown, congressional testimony-inducing crisis.
Finally, the organization that resorts to original or non-routine solutions when
faced with a troublesome situation is operating based on the perception of a crisis. The
salient point is not whether the organization has arrived at a correct analysis of the
situation and, in turn, the correct response, if such a chimera can be said to exist, but
rather how this analysis influences subsequent behavior. In effect, the accuracy of the
account of the situation is less germane than its persuasiveness. To the extent that
organizational actors actively construct the specific context in which they find
themselves, their particular interpretations of a difficult situation will govern the resulting
action. Moreover, as Pearson and Clair assert, “executive perceptions are the fundamental
and initiating variable in determining potential outcomes from a crisis.”
60
In the Costa
Concordia disaster, for instance, an evacuation order was the result of deeming the ship’s
grounding a crisis situation.
On the other side of the equation lie the perceptions of external constituents and
the real social, political and ethical effects that flow from them. The media plays the
largest role in this regard, inspiring another rendition of the Thomas Theorem: “If CNN
defines a situation as a crisis, it will indeed be a crisis in all its consequences.”
61
The
media’s account of a given situation will be more widely perceived and believed than its
factual reality. In this context, situations defined as crises in the media can – and often do

60
Penrose, John M, “The Role of Perception in Crisis Planning,” Public Relations Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 161.
61
Ibid.
27

– become self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, even if the media wrongfully applies
the crisis label to a situation that might otherwise be considered a mere problem or non-
issue in objectivist terms, the collective internalization of this construct among the
general public will yield a crisis through the beliefs crystalized and actions taken as a
result. Thus, although media sources often declare a crisis where none exists,
stakeholders nevertheless operate under the assumption that the organization has violated
their expectations and act accordingly. Their perceptions of organizational misconduct
result in real-life behaviors, such as negative word-of-mouth, unfavorable emotional
responses and decreased purchase intentions. Hence, a situation defined as crisis becomes
one it its consequences.
That such ‘situations’ are constituted by the participants rather than simply being
self-evident is best illustrated by considering the way a situation of ill-defined
threat only becomes a crisis when that threat is defined as such. For example,
financial losses – even rapid and radical losses – do not constitute a ‘crisis’ until
the shareholders decide to sell in large numbers, and even then the notion of a
crisis does not emerge objectively from the activity of selling but at the point at
which a ‘crisis’ is pronounced by someone significant and becomes accepted as
such by significant others.
62

In sum, the power Thomas Theorem as it is applied to organizational crisis
depends on two interrelated conditions: a) the definition or labeling of a situation as a
crisis by a credible actor internal or external to the organization, and b) the attendant
attitudes, beliefs and behaviors generated as a result of this declaration.

62
Grint, Keith, “Problems, Problems, Problems: The Social Construction of 'Leadership',” Human Relations 58, no. 11 (2005): 1474.
28

Crisification
The notion of crisification adopts and extends the analytical lens of the Thomas
Theorem as it pertains to the social and political effects of crisis labeling. It begins with
the premise that crises are not naturally given phenomena; that is, they cannot be
identified by some objective indicators, for instance, the conventionally accepted markers
of threat, short response time and the element of surprise.
63
Instead, crisification espouses
the position that assigning the crisis label is a social and political act, with corresponding
social and political consequences.
64
In doing so, it not only embraces a demarcation of
crises as social and subjective constructions, but also proposes that the crisis label has
particular effects in and of itself.
Hence, “an event or a process is dealt with differently if labelled [sic] a crisis than
if considered a normal situation. Certain actions are made possible that otherwise would
not have been.”
65
To that end, the focus is on how situations come be to be regarded as
crises, in addition to how these labeling practices legitimize and liberalize certain actions.
In other words, the construction of an issue as a crisis sanctions a disruption of normal
procedures, thereby allowing for the use of extraordinary measures.
66

Crisifying a situation allows the organization to pursue actions outside the bounds
of what is normally acceptable. “The inter-subjective understanding that the organization
is in crisis will result in some form of action. This may be in the form of a change of
procedure; it can be a launching of the organization's crisis response, or even something

63
Narby, Petter, “Crisification and the Landsbanki Saga” (paper, presented to the SGIR 7th Pan-European Conference on International
Relations, Stockholm, Sweden, September 9-11, 2010), 1.
64
Ibid.

65
Ibid.
66
Ibid.

29

else.”
67
Moreover, the successful rendition of a situation as a particular kind of problem –
specifically, a crisis – at once justifies media analysis and critique of the purported
organizational wrongdoing and encourages the public to impose whatever penalties they
deem appropriate. The denaturalized view of crisis that crisification assumes as its central
tenet represents a stark departure from the catalogue of crisis literature, which is
primarily concerned with managerial instruction and the technical aspects of crisis
communication.
68
How crises are constructed and labeled, and the effects produced by
this process of crisification, is largely overlooked.

67
Jacobsen, Johan and Daniel Simonsen, “Toward a New Understanding of Crises: Defining Organizational Crises Through a
Phenomenological Approach” (conference paper, Second International Conference on Crisis Communication at the Beginning of the
21
st
Century, Aarhus, Denmark, October 6-8, 2011), 12.
68
Narby, “Crisification and the Landsbanki Saga,” 1.

30

Chapter III: The Role of the Media
News Framing Theory
News Framing Theory centers on the idea that the way a given situation is framed
or explained in the media directly influences how audience members perceive it.
69
The
production and presentation of news involves choices. Accordingly, the majority of news
content is merely a subjective representation of reality carefully pieced together by news
producers rather than an unadulterated recreation of past events. News frames are
essentially principles of selection as “reporters and editors routinely choose among
various approaches to the presentation of news stories.”
70
In doing so, they prime
audiences and draw their attention to certain aspects of an event while deliberating
excluding others.
71
It is in this way that the cognitive effects of these framing methods
operate at the subconscious level.
The implication of framing theory is that the use of different frames causes the
situation to be understood in different ways. “Frames can define problems, diagnose
causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Influencing the way a crisis is
framed is important because the frame determines how people understand and remember
a problem, as well as how they evaluate and choose to act upon it.”
72
Many crisis
communications scholars have applied framing theory in their research, focusing on how
organizations are portrayed by the media in the wake of a crisis and manner in which the
media elects to report the news.

69
Matthew W. Seeger and Timothy L. Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 140.
70
Ibid.
71
Kirk Hallahan, “Framing Theory,” in The Encyclopedia of Public Relations, ed. Robert L. Heath (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005),
342.
72
Teeter-Baker, “Constant Crisis,” 11.

31

Framing can be seen as a form of publicity.
73
When an organization is embroiled
in a crisis, it typically attempts to frame the event and its subsequent response efforts as
favorably as possible. Media outlets then construct and certify the so-called reality of the
situation by accepting, rejecting or reframing the crisis based on their own
interpretations.
74
Furthermore, the media can frame a crisis event, and the organization’s
involvement in it, as positively or negatively as it so chooses. News framing theory
analyzes both the messages circulated in the media and those produced by organization
itself in their discrete efforts to frame a given crisis situation. Nevertheless, their
respective interpretations of a particular crisis event are often at odds with one another.
Polarity in framing crises is quite common and the disparities between organizational
frames and media counter-frames may be best understood as framing contests.
“Crises typically generate a contest between frames and counter-frames
concerning the nature and severity of a crisis, its causes, the responsibility for its
occurrence or escalation, and implications for the future.”
75
The outcome of this dynamic
process is critical, since it will heavily influence stakeholders’ perceptions of the event, in
addition to crystallizing public opinion on the crisis-afflicted organization. If a crisis is
framed in a way that implicates the organization negatively, its ability to recover from the
event will be complicated or impaired. Conversely, a positive portrayal of the
organization by way of favorable crisis news frames will facilitate and expedite

73
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 140.
74
Ibid.
75
Arjen Boin, Paul ‘t Hart and Allan McConnell, “Crisis Exploitation: Political and Policy Impacts of Framing Contests,” Journal of
European Public Policy 16, no. 1 (2009): 82.

32

organizational recovery. Essentially, “the way in which news coverage of a crisis is
framed affects the public’s emotional response toward the company involved.”
76

Given that public opinion is formed by the way events are reported in the media,
it is essential that crisis-afflicted organizations participate in the framing process.
77

According to Holladay, this involvement begins with paying close attention to the
information audiences receive about a crisis situation, screening for inaccuracies and
unfavorable news frames.
78
Organizations must then go to great pains to counter
misinformation and offer an alternative interpretation or frame of the situation. Those that
remain silent and allow incorrect assumptions and negative crisis frames to go
unchallenged will be found wanting in the court of public opinion.
Gatekeeping
Gatekeeping refers to the way in which news stories are sifted for dissemination
to the public by the mass media.
79
It is the "process of culling and crafting countless bits
of information into the limited number of messages that reach people every day. This
process determines not only which information is selected, but also what the content and
nature of the messages, such as news, will be."
80
Thus, gatekeeping involves the various
decision-making processes that determine whether a given message or subject will be
circulated to a wider audience, particularly in mainstream news publications, whether
through print, broadcast or online distribution.
In effect, media gatekeepers are tasked with controlling the flow of information
from the top down, reducing countless ideas, events and experiences into the few

76
Nathan Hurst, “Emotional News Framing Affects Public Response to Crises, MU Study Finds,” University of Missouri News
Bureau (Columbia, MO), January 10, 2012.
77
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 140.
78
Ibid.
79
Pamela J. Shoemaker, “Media Gatekeeping,” in An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research, ed. Michael B.
Salwen and Don W. Stacks (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 79.
80
Pamela J. Shoemaker and Timothy Vos, Gatekeeping Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1.
33

messages that are made accessible to news consumers. As with framing, by determining
what makes it into the news and what is consciously omitted, the gatekeeping function of
the media controls, limits and shapes the public’s knowledge of all societal occurrences,
heavily influencing their perception of reality.
81
“In fact, gatekeeping in mass
communication can be seen as the overall process through which the social reality
transmitted by the news media is constructed, and is not just a series of “in” and ”out”
decisions.”
82

In the democratic marketplace of ideas, wire services, journalists and a variety of
other sources provide major news publications with a large number of potential stories
from which to choose. Since a given medium only possesses a limited amount of space,
time and resources to devote to a particular subject, an equally limited number of news
stories may be deemed appropriate for dissemination. The process of selecting or
rejecting stories for circulation is governed by a set of rules or forces known as principles
of newsworthiness or news values. While there are an infinite number of factors in news
selection that tend to be culturally, temporally and spatially specific, there are several
fairly consistent and predictable criteria that pertain to the presentation of crises in the
media, namely timeliness, relevance or impact, prominence, negativity and
unexpectedness.
In terms of timeliness, recent events or those in the midst of unfolding possess
inherent news value and have become increasingly significant with the advent of the 24/7
news cycle. Crises that square well with the production considerations of news
publications are likely to receive extensive initial treatment as well as follow-up coverage

81
Melvin L DeFleur, Mass Communication Theories: Explaining Origins, Processes, and Effects (London: Pearson, 2009).
82
Pamela J. Shoemaker, Martin Eichholz, Eunyi Kim and Brenda Wrigley, “Individual and Routine Forces in Gatekeeping,”
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2001): 233.

34

as more information becomes available. Furthermore, principles of timeliness vary from
print to broadcast and digital media. The latter have the ability to cover events almost
immediately, which is why large-scale crises like plane crashes, oil spills, natural
disasters and acts of terrorism often make digital headlines mere moments after they
occur. It is also important to note that timeliness can be relative; a crisis event or the
actions that gave rise to a crisis may have occurred in the past, but only come to light
recently. Impact or relevance refers to the number of people affected by a news story
about a given crisis situation. Thus, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami was more
newsworthy than a run-of-the-mill earthquake plaguing coastal California. An impactful
story may be somewhat important to a large group of people or especially critical to a
small number. “It also goes without saying that a story that is very important to a large
group of people is a very relevant story.”
83

With reference to prominence, certain people, organizations and institutions are
considered more newsworthy than others simply by virtue of their status. Crises are
significantly more likely to receive coverage in the mainstream media if they involve
elites like celebrities, public figures or popular corporations. For example, Donald
Sterling’s racist remarks became the subject of widespread media attention due to his
position as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. The situation would have received
nary a headline had it involved the owner of an obscure sports franchise like the
Hiroshima Toyo Carp. Negativity may also be referred to as controversy or scandal. In
brief, bad news is always more newsworthy than good news. Crises are negative events
by definition, thereby enhancing their inherent news value.

83
Berkowitz, Daniel A, Cultural Meanings of News: A Text Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 89.
35

Finally, if an event or situation is out of the ordinary and therefore unexpected, it
will have greater newsworthiness than an everyday occurrence. Once again, by their very
definition, crises for the most part adhere to the principle of unexpectedness. In sum, the
relative newsworthiness of a given topic or event is positively related to its likelihood of
passing through the semi-permeable gates of a news medium into the realm of public
opinion. In other words, the more news values it possesses, the more apt it is to become
news. Thus, the tremendous coverage that crises receive is a direct function of their
inherent newsworthiness.
“The proliferation of information on the Internet has diminished the power of
journalism’s gatekeepers, but journalists can still serve a role in sorting, interpreting and
lending credibility to news on behalf of the public.”
84
In doing so, they ascribe
newsworthiness to a given subject or event, increasing the likelihood that it receives
public attention. In fact, many of the same principles that make an event newsworthy
within the mass-mediated model of news production and dissemination also make it
fodder for a tweet, blog entry or Facebook post. Moreover, social media can be as
confusing as it is helpful and informative in crisis situations, driving the public to seek
information from traditional news sources. Hence, the principles of gatekeeping, and their
force in the modern media landscape, are still very applicable in the context of modern
crises.
Nevertheless, the gatekeeping function of the media typically fails in the early
stages of a crisis.
85
In practice, this means that the totality of available information about

84
Monica Stevens, “Journalist Gatekeeper Responsibilities,” Houston Chronicle (Houston, TX).
85
Dawn R. Gilpin and Priscilla J. Murphy, Crisis Management in a Complex World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 50.
36

a given crisis is often filtered into news stories regardless of accuracy.
86
“An organization
must be the controlling source of information during a crisis. If a company isn't proactive
with its crisis communication strategy, an information vacuum is created and the media
will obtain information elsewhere.”
87
Since crises often defy interpretations, imposing
severe demands on the public’s information processing and sense-making abilities, the
crisis manager must assume the task of the organization’s gatekeeper, controlling the
flow of information and countering misinformation about the crisis to the media and
relevant audiences.
88
To that end, “the way in which crisis spokespersons respond to the
media’s inquiries has a profound effect on how the crisis is perceived by the public.”
89

This latter notion calls attention to the need for proactive media relations outreach on the
part of the organization in periods of relative stability as well as times of turbulence.
Agenda Setting
Agenda setting is closely related to and also a corollary of gatekeeping. Agenda-
setting theory highlights the media’s “ability to influence the salience of topics on the
public agenda.”
90
Therefore, in performing its gatekeeping function, the media also draws
attention to certain issues and events over others, signifying how much importance to
attach to a given topic on the basis of the emphasis placed on it. Through their
determination of what information is to be accepted or rejected as news, the media
establishes the agenda for public discourse. Thus, while the media may be somewhat
impotent in telling the public what to think – an assertion that remains open to challenge

86
Ibid.
87
Teeter-Baker, “Constant Crisis,” 9.
88
Karl E. Weick, “Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations,” Journal of Management Studies 25, no. 4 (1988): 305.
89
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 138.
90
Maxwell McCombs and Amy Reynolds, “News Influence on our Pictures of the World,” in Media Effects: Advances in Theory and
Research, ed. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 1.

37

– they are an incredibly powerful forces in telling audiences what to think about.
91
“In
other words, the news media can set the agenda for the public’s attention to that small
group of issues around which public opinion forms.”
92

Agenda setting relies on two underlying suppositions: a) the media do not mirror
reality; they actively shape and construct it, and b) by focusing on a few issues and
events, they cultivate the public perception that those subjects are more significant than
they actually are. It is important to note that contemporary agenda-setting in the online
media environment is an iterative process. That is, as the mass media devotes more
attention to a particular cause or event, public perceptions of its salience increase. In turn,
social media users and bloggers co-opt this agenda as their own and it becomes the
subject of online discussion. The media takes this public endorsement as impetus to
ascribe even greater significance to the event, subsequently giving it more play and
attention. This cycle repeats ad infinitum, until the story is displaced by another or simply
fades from the spotlight and drops off the public agenda due to waning interest.
The mass media’s near fanatical coverage of business and organizational crises
heightens the public’s sense of the relative importance of these events. In fact, the nature
of crises may actually enhance the agenda-setting effect of the media. Weaver suggests
that the high levels of uncertainty inherent in crisis situations and the hyperbolic interest
that surrounds them drives the public’s need for orientation.
93
In other words, when a
potential crisis event occurs, society looks to the media for judgments about the event’s
importance or gravity. It must be noted that a situation or event must receive a minimum

91
Ibid.
92
Maxwell McCombs, “The Agenda-Setting Role of the Mass Media in the Shaping of Public Opinion,” (paper presented at the Mass
Media Economic 2002 Conference, London School of Economics, June 28-29, 2002), 1.
93
Heath and O’Hair, Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication, 400.

38

amount of media coverage for the public to perceive it as a crisis and attribute
prominence to the problem or issue.
It is interesting and enlightening that research has revealed “a lack of convergence
when comparing real-world indicators of hazards and problems with media coverage.”
94

That is, there appears to be no significant relationship between the media’s portrayal of
crises and the realities of these occurrences. This finding gives credence to the notion of
crises as social constructions. Moreover, it demonstrates that although the public often
reacts to alleged crises in ways that could be described as irrational, their reactions are
indeed rational since they are responding to seemingly verified mediated representations
of these events and not their objective realities. In sum, agenda setting has major
implications for the presentation of certain events and issues as crises in the media and
the resulting public perceptions.

94
Ibid., 401.
39

Chapter IV: Literature Review
Crisis Typologies
In crisis management and communication research, there is a tendency to group
crises into broad categories of general types. The crisis classification systems posited by
communication theorists range from simple two-category models to complex,
multidimensional taxonomies, and detail the wide spectrum of threats organizations may
face. Whatever form they take, they all serve as tools for crisis managers to reduce
uncertainty about a given crisis situation. It is important to note that none of these lists or
organizing systems claims to be exhaustive. Hence, the onus is on the crisis planner to
brainstorm and conceive all of the possible crisis situations his or her organization may
face. There are two broad types of crises, intentional and unintentional, that can be
further broken down into more specified categories.
95
At the risk of stating the obvious,
intentional crises are those prompted by purposeful actions aimed at harming an
organization, whereas unintentional crises are not caused deliberately, but instead
transpire rather haphazardly. There are a number of subcategories within the two main
types; each will be addressed in turn.
The first subgenre of intentional crises is terrorism. The 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon demonstrated that organizations in practically every
industry are vulnerable to terrorism-related crises. American and United Airlines, the
companies whose planes were hijacked, were just two of the myriad organizations
immediately embroiled in crisis when news broke of the felled towers. Sabotage is
another form of intentional crisis. It is when an actor either external or internal to the

95
Seeger, Sellnow and Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication, 10.
40

organization causes damage to its products, workplace facilities or production capacity.
96

A perfect example of sabotage, and one that has become a classic and seminal case study
in crisis management, is the Tylenol tampering scandal. More recent examples of
organizational sabotage include the Sony Pictures hack and the Target, Home Depot and
eBay data breaches.
The third category of intentional crisis is poor employee relationships. This group
of situations encompasses a wide range of negative behaviors. For example, an
organization may develop something of a negative reputation for mistreating workers or
for providing a deplorable or unsafe working environment.
97
Nike, The Gap and The
Walt Disney Company each faced crisis situations when they became targets of
widespread criticism about the mistreatment of workers in their factories overseas.
Another illustration is when growing discontent about working conditions among
unionized employees manifests in a labor strike, which has the potential to completely
halt normal business operations, thereby affecting an organization’s bottom line.
98

Workplace violence is a related, though distinct, class of crisis. It is when an employee or
former employee commits an act of physical abuse against another worker on the
organization’s premises. In 2012, for instance, a Lululemon Athletica employee
murdered one of her co-workers at the company’s store in Bethesda, Maryland.
By contrast, unintentional crises include natural disasters, disease outbreaks,
product failure and downturns in the economy. In terms of natural disasters, tornadoes,
hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods and wildfires can be damaging for
organizations, creating crisis situations that require immediate action. An organization

96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid.
41

may be severely damaged by these types of events, especially in instances where property
is destroyed or their employees’ or stakeholders’ safety is compromised. For example,
Hurricane Katrina devastated the better part of the entire Gulf Coast of the United States
in addition to the countless organizations located there. Despite the fevered imaginations
of conspiracy theorists, disease outbreaks are an inadvertent and inevitable category of
crisis. Ebola is an example of a recent disease outbreak-related crisis. Food-borne
illnesses are a form of disease outbreak crisis that do not always occur naturally, but
rather often result from organizational failure and inadequate vigilance.
99
Each year,
dozens of strains of salmonella, E. coli and Listeria contaminate a variety of foodstuff
items, prompting crises for many organizations including the producers, suppliers and
vendors of the tainted goods.
Product failure is rather common situation and one of the most frequent crisis
types experienced by organizations in many different industries. It can be described as
any situation where product performance is perceived to be at odds with design
specifications or consumer expectations. Nevertheless, product failure alone is not a
sufficient condition for the manifestation of crisis. Rather, they typically only reach crisis
levels when product recalls are involved; that is, when organizations pull their products
from retail outlets upon the discovery of defects that may compromise the safety and
health of consumers. For example, in 2014, General Motors recalled almost 29 million
cars due to a number of problems. Finally, few organizations, if any, are immune to
downturns in the economy. Some may be able to weather market slumps more
successfully than others; however, economic downturns can quickly reach crisis

99
Ibid.
42

proportions, often resulting in organizational downsizing, mass layoffs and bankruptcies,
to which the Great Recession testifies.
Coombs clusters crises into three general categories according to their associated
attributions of responsibility, which will be explained further in the section on his
Situational Crisis Communication Theory. Victim crisis include natural disasters,
workplace violence and product tampering.
100
To these he adds another form of crisis that
can be considered intentional, namely rumors. When people circulate false and damaging
information about an organization it can seriously impact its reputation, bottom line and
even jeopardize its very survival.
101
It is in this way that rumors represent crises of public
perception. In the early ‘90s, PepsiCo found itself in the midst of a crisis when a syringe
was allegedly found in a can of the company’s Diet Pepsi. This supposed discovery
prompted more than fifty additional product-tampering claims with the FDA. While it
was later revealed to be a hoax, the company nevertheless identified the situation as a
crisis and communicated openly with the media and the public to prove its innocence and
diffuse the situation.
Coombs’ second cluster is accidental crises, which includes challenges,
megadamage, technical breakdown accidents and technical breakdown recalls.
Challenges are when stakeholders claim an organization is operating inappropriately
102
,
like the backlash experienced by SeaWorld about the company’s treatment of killer
whales in response to the film Blackfish. Megadamage is a large-scale accident that
results in major environmental damage, such as the Exxon Valdez and BP oil spills.
Technical breakdown accidents occur when organizational equipment or technology fails,

100
W. Timothy Coombs, “The Protective Powers of Crisis Response Strategies,” Journal of Promotion Management 12, no. 3 (2006):
244.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.

43

causing an industrial disaster.
103
Commercial aviation crashes are a common example of
technical breakdown accidents in instances where pilot error was not a factor.
Coombs’ final cluster is preventable crises, comprising human breakdown
accidents, human breakdown recalls, organizational misdeed with no injuries,
organizational misdeed with injuries and management misconduct. Human breakdown
accidents and recalls are the same sort of events as their accidental counterparts, except
they are caused by human error. The Costa Concordia shipwreck was an instance of a
human breakdown accident. “In February 2008, the Department of Agriculture recalled
143 million pounds of beef after a California slaughterhouse was accused of improperly
butchering downer cattle,” thereby constituting a human breakdown recall crisis.
104

Organizational misdeeds with and without injuries are when stakeholders are deceived or
placed at risk by the organization. An example of an organizational misdeed was when
Sketchers was hit with a class-action lawsuit because of deceptive and unfounded claims
the company had made in advertisements for its Shape-up line of footwear. The crisis
was exacerbated by additional claims that the fitness shoes caused injuries like tendinitis,
broken bones and joint pain. Finally, management misconduct is when the management
of an organization knowingly violates laws or regulations, as in the Enron and WorldCom
accounting scandals.
In addition to the aforementioned categories of crisis postulated by Coombs, he
typifies crises in more abstract terms along two spectrums: internal/external and

103
Ibid
104
“Top 10 Product Recalls,” Time.com, last modified July 2, 2009. http://goo.gl/0cZeIf.

44

intentional/unintentional.
105
Within this matrix, Coombs identifies four major forms of
crisis, namely faux pas, accidents, terrorism and transgressions.

Figure 1: Coombs' Crisis Type Matrix.
106

A faux pas is an unintentional organizational act that an external actor frames as a
crisis, like the abovementioned PepsiCo example.
107
The salient point is that the
organization believes it behaved in an appropriate manner, and therefore harbored no
malicious intent, as in the case of the SeaWorld Blackfish controversy.
108
In faux pas
situations, it is one party’s word against another’s. Hence, they are often shrouded in
ambiguity, and the authority rests with the public and the media to render an ultimate
verdict.
109

Consistent with the way in which accidents are traditionally defined, according to
Coombs, they are unintentional events that occur during the course of normal practices
and operations.
110
He lists natural disasters, industrial accidents and workplace injuries
under this category since they are fairly uncontrollable and random in nature.
Alternatively, “transgressions are intentional actions taken by an organization that

105
W. Timothy Coombs, “Choosing the Right Words: The Development of Guidelines for the Selection of the "Appropriate" Crisis-
Response Strategies,” Management Communication Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1995): 454-455.
106
Ibid.
107
Ibid.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid.
110
Ibid., 456.

45

knowingly place publics at risk or harm.”
111
The aforementioned GM recalls are
examples of transgressions since the company knew of the problem for a decade but
failed to rectify it. Finally terrorism refers to purposeful actions carried out by external
actors to damage the organization or its stakeholders, like the Tylenol product tampering
crisis.
112

It is important to differentiate between the various crisis types since the nature of
the events and how they are perceived will determine the form and content of the
organization’s crisis management activities.
113
Furthermore, the utility of crisis
typologies depends on the assumption that crises in the same category possess innate
similarities, allowing crisis managers to develop a single plan for each group.
114
Yet
another reason for grouping crises by type is the fact that their successful management
hinges upon the planner’s ability to reduce uncertainty for future crises, allowing for
greater control when they ultimately transpire. Part of this process involves identifying
those events and crises that have the potential to affect an organization, assigning each
category a certain level of risk and allocating resources accordingly.
115
It is important to
note that few organizations will be equally vulnerable to every cluster of crisis. Thus, the
crisis planner must assume the difficult task of emphasizing and addressing those events
that have a stronger likelihood of occurring. There are a number of other taxonomies in
crisis communications research; however, their inclusion herein would unduly obfuscate
and lengthen this volume.

111
Ibid., 457.
112
Ibid.
113
Coombs, “The Protective Powers of Crisis Response Strategies,” 243.
114
Ibid.
115
Ibid.

46

Crisis Communication Theories
Numerous researchers working within the field of crisis communications have
posited theories to build a broader understanding of crises in general, as well as how
these complex phenomena ought to be managed in narrowly defined situations. The
conceptual frameworks developed by crisis communications experts extend across
disciplinary boundaries, drawing ideas and methodologies from psychology, sociology,
business, political science and even mathematics and physics, each making unique
contributions to the growing body of scholarly knowledge on communication in
organizational crisis.
116

Many public relations practitioners question the utility of crisis communication
theories, under the wrongful assumption that they serve no practical function in real-
world applications. Indeed, theory is an oft-misunderstood concept, one that is frequently
confounded with the notion of a hypothesis.
117
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation
used to understand or predict phenomena, and is therefore no more substantiated than an
educated guess.
118
The important distinction is that while hypotheses are testable, they
have generally yet to be tested.
119
Hypotheses evolve into theories upon successful,
rigorous testing.
120
Thus, public relations professionals should not be so quick to dismiss
crisis communication theories as purely speculative and irrelevant to practice. By their
very definition, the various crisis theories are grounded in empirical evidence, arising
from repeated observation and testing based on scientific method.

116
Seeger, Sellnow and Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication, 20.
117
Professor Varnell Royal, “Practice and Theory,” The Veterinarian 40, no. 471 (1867): 216.
118
Ibid.
119
Kendra Cherry, “Introduction to Research Methods,” Psychology.about.com.
http://psychology.about.com/od/researchmethods/ss/expdesintro_2.htm.
120
Ibid.

47

Corporate Apologia
Corporate Apologia is the speech of defense.
121
It is best described as a method of
responding to organizational criticism and allegations of wrongdoing by presenting a
compelling defense and “competing account of organizational accusations.”
122
It is a
reactive approach to public relations aimed at confronting and remedying crises once they
have occurred through specified post hoc response strategies.
123
Hearit cautions against
mistaking apologia with the simple apology.
124
Whereas apologies express regret and
tend to seek forgiveness for one’s actions, apologias are ways of excusing and justifying
actions that are seen to violate commonly-held public values, without necessarily
admitting guilt or wrongdoing.
125
It is in this way that apologias target a certain level of
organizational absolution as their optimal outcome.
The Corporate Apologia framework offers four distinct communication strategies
that crisis-afflicted organizations can use to protect their reputations and maintain the
viability of their enterprises, namely: denial, bolstering, differentiation and
transcendence.
126
These rhetorical devices rest on differing notions of organizational
responsibility and guilt that drive the suitability of their selection. In other words, the
nature of a given crisis situation will dictate the appropriateness of employing one
response alternative over another. The denial position is one that refutes any notion of
guilt. It either claims that there was no wrongdoing altogether, or that the organization
was simply uninvolved.
127
“Strategies of denial are obviously useful to the speaker only
to the extent that such negations do not constitute a known distortion of reality or to the

121
Seeger, Sellnow and Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication, 26.
122
Ibid.
123
Seeger, Sellnow and Ulmer, Effective Crisis Communication, 27.
124
Keith Michael Hearit, Crisis Management by Apology: Corporate Response to Allegations of Wrongdoing (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 2006): 4.
125
Ibid.
126
Heath and O’Hair, Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication, 303.
127
Coombs and Holladay, The Handbook of Crisis Communication, 286.
48

point that they conflict with other beliefs held by the audience.”
128
Accordingly, this
approach can only be pursued by organizations accused of impropriety for which there is
no irrefutable proof. In instances where a categorical denial of the crisis – or the
organization’s involvement in it – is too implausible for widespread acceptance,
organizational actors may resort to a mere denial of intent.
129

Bolstering is best thought of as a counterpart to denial.
130
Organizations that
mobilize this approach attempt to align or identify themselves with sentiments and values
viewed favorably by their stakeholders.
131
In doing so, they strive to boost or bolster their
credibility.
132
Thus, whereas “denial is an instrument of negation; bolstering is a source
of identification.”
133
By contrast, differentiation is a communication tactic that seeks to
distance the organization from allegations of wrongdoing.
134
This is primarily achieved
by distinguishing the crisis from more objectionable actions and events to make it seem
less offensive by comparison.
135

The final strategy within the Apologia framework is transcendence. Like
differentiation, this method involves decontextualizing the crisis event, but rather than
simply removing its negative connotations, the crisis is placed in a broader, more positive
context.
136
It is a big picture approach to crisis management based on abstraction rather
than the particulars of a given crisis situation.
137
Organizations pursuing a transcendence
strategy subordinate their misconduct by highlighting past records of good behavior or by

128
B.L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic Criticism of Apologia,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 59, no. 3 (1973): 275.
129
Ibid., 276.
130
Ibid., 277.
131
Ibid.
132
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 165.
133
Ware and Linkugel, “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves,” 278.
134
Ibid.
135
Coombs and Holladay, The Handbook of Crisis Communication, 287.
136
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 166.
137
Ryan Michael Shepard, “The Art of Simulated Atonement: A Case Study of George W. Bush” (master’s thesis, University of
Kansas, 2007), 19.
49

connecting the crisis to some higher organizational goal or purpose. Denial and bolstering
are considered reformative strategies, as they attempt to alter stakeholders’ perceptions of
the crisis, whereas differentiation and transcendence are transformative methods that try
to change the meaning of the crisis altogether.
138

Image Repair Theory
Benoit’s Image Repair Theory is a second dominant paradigm in crisis
communication research. It is largely derived from apologia rhetoric, particularly the idea
that organizations routinely face situations where they must explain or justify certain
actions with excuses or apologies.
139
Benoit initially labeled his typology of crisis
response strategies Image Restoration Theory, but later revised the title upon the
realization that it is not always possible to restore an organization’s image to pre-crisis
levels.
140
As either designation suggests, Benoit’s framework outlines strategies designed
to help organizations reduce or avoid damage to their reputations in instances of
perceived wrongdoing.
Benoit’s theory rests upon two central assumptions: 1) that communication is
goal-oriented, and 2) that the primary objective of communication in the organizational
context is maintaining a positive reputation or image.
141
Benoit defines image as “the
perceptions of the source held by the audience, shaped by the words and deeds of the
source, as well as by the actions of other relevant actors.”
142
Two conditions must be met
to constitute reputational damage: 1) an undesirable act or event and 2) an attribution of

138
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 166.
139
Ibid., 168.
140
Ibid.
141
Roberts, Glen F., “Image Restoration Theory: An Empirical Study of Corporate Apology Tactics Employed by the U.S. Air Force
Academy” (master’s thesis, University of South Florida, 2006), 21.
142
Ibid., 1.
50

organizational responsibility for the act.
143
It is important to note that it is irrelevant if
either of these components is actually grounded in reality. What matters is the perception
of truth among key audience and stakeholder groups.
Benoit advances five broad categories of communication strategies for actors
seeking to defend or improve their organizations’ image in the wake of a crisis. As in
Corporate Apologia Theory, the first approach available to organizations confronted with
allegations of misconduct is denial. This may take the form of simple denial, in which
organizations assert that there is no crisis or that they had no involvement in it.
Furthermore, Benoit adds another dimension to the denial approach as outlined in
Apologia Theory: the idea of shifting blame to someone else.
144

The second general strategy Benoit identifies is evading responsibility, an
umbrella approach with four variations. The first, provocation, makes the claim that the
undesirable act was performed in response to the wrongful actions of another party. Thus,
the behavior in question is alleged to have been provoked. Defeasibility is the second
variant, in which organizations argue that the wrongdoing could not have been
conceivably forestalled due to a lack of information. The third alternative of evading
responsibility is the assertion that a given misdeed was the result of an accident. Finally,
crisis-afflicted organizations may attempt to justify the offensive act, or reduce apparent
responsibility for it, by citing good intentions.
145

Benoit’s third category of image repair tactics is reducing offensiveness. He
emphasizes that organizations should only mobilize this approach, and specifically one of
the six sub-strategies that comprise it, when denial and evading responsibility are not

143
Ibid., 21.
144
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 169.
145
Ibid., 170.

51

viable options.
146
In this context, an organization “accused of misbehavior may attempt to
reduce the degree of ill-feeling experienced by the audience.”
147
Bolstering,
differentiation and transcendence, three of the six alternatives, are transposed from
Apologia Theory virtually unchanged.
148
To these strategies Benoit appends
minimization, attacking the accuser and compensation.
Predictably, minimization involves making the wrongful act appear less offensive
and undesirable than it ostensibly seems to be.
149
The third variation, attacking the
credibility of the accuser, is self-explanatory. Finally, compensation is when
organizations offer restitution, financial or otherwise, to counterweigh the offensiveness
of the act in question. Benoit likens this tactic to a bribe.
150
Corrective action is Benoit’s
fourth category of response strategies, which may be pursued in one of two ways.
Organizations can either repair the damage caused by the wrongful act to solve the
problem or implement measures to prevent a recurrence in the future.
151
Mortification,
Benoit’s fifth and final approach, is when organizations assume full responsibility for the
wrongdoing and are left with no other recourse but to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
It is the only strategy that dictates an admission of guilt.
152

Situational Crisis Communication Theory
Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) is arguably the most
well-known and widely applied framework in crisis management. Like Corporate
Apologia and Image Repair Theory, SCCT identifies communication strategies for

146
Ibid.
147
William L. Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies, Second Edition: Image Repair Theory and Research (Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2014), 24.
148
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 170.
149
Ibid.
150
Benoit, Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies, 25.
151
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 170.
152
Ibid.

52

repairing an organization’s reputation in the wake of a crisis. Moreover, Coombs
prescribes response tactics synthesized from the aforementioned models, based on a
comprehensive evaluation of the crisis situation and the reputational threat posed by it.
153

To that end, in addition to outlining communication strategies, the paradigm also
distinguishes between various crisis types or frames. Thus, SCCT is essentially a system
that matches response strategies with the particulars of the crisis event.
154

Coombs uses Attribution Theory to explain the relationship between specific
crisis frames and their recommended response strategies. “Attribution Theory posits that
people make judgments about the causes of events…and these attributions can lead
people to certain feelings and behaviors.”
155
Stakeholders may attribute the cause of a
crisis to the organization or external factors, however, Coombs stresses that stronger
attributions of organizational responsibility generate greater reputational damage.
156
The
SCCT crisis narratives are tools for altering stockholders’ attributional perspectives,
particularly in terms of how they assign responsibility for the event and view the
organization altogether.
157
Thus, PR practitioners should match response strategies to the
perceived level of organizational responsibility for the crisis as well as the reputational
threat posed by it.
Coombs’ repertoire of facework strategies is divided into four postures: deny,
diminish, rebuild and reinforce. The denial approach seeks to prove a crisis does not exist
or that the organization bears no responsibility for it, thereby eliminating the reputational

153
Coombs, “The Protective Powers of Crisis Response Strategies,” 242.
154
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 91.
155
Coombs, “Choosing the Right Words,” 448-449.
156
Heath and O’Hair, Handbook of Risk and Crisis Communication, 110.
157
Ibid.

53

threat presented by the alleged wrongdoing.
158
To Apologia and Image Repair Theory’s
simple denial and attacking the accuser strategies Coombs adds scapegoating under the
broad umbrella of denial. Organizational actors scapegoat when they lay blame for a
crisis on a person or group external to the organization.
159
It is in the diminish posture
that attribution theory comes into play. Organizations that take this position acknowledge
the existence of a crisis and their involvement in it, but strive to change stakeholders’
attributions of organizational control for the event to attenuate the potential damage to
their reputations.
160
This can either be achieved through excuses, in which organizations
deny intentions to do harm or claim the wrongful act was beyond their control, or
justifications, where they attempt to minimize the perceived severity of the crisis.
161

The rebuild stance is a way for organizations to make amends for their apparent
guilt in instances of unambiguous organizational wrongdoing through compensation or an
apology.
162
Those who select the latter approach take full responsibility for the crisis and
therefore have other recourse than to ask their stakeholders for forgiveness.
163
Finally,
reinforce is a supplemental posture that must be used in conjunction with one of the
other three types. The specific strategies that comprise this position include bolstering, or
highlighting past good deeds, ingratiation, or praising stakeholders, and victimage, which
is when an organization claims to be a victim of circumstance.
164

SCCT is similar to Corporate Apologia and Image Repair Theory in that it too
provides a list of post-crisis response strategies. Nevertheless, as an evidenced-based

158
Coombs, “The Protective Powers of Crisis Response Strategies,” 247.
159
Ibid.
160
Ibid.
161
Ibid., 248.
162
W. Timothy Coombs, “Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis: The Development and Application of Situational
Crisis Communication Theory,” Corporate Reputation Review 10, no. 3 (2007): 170.
163
Ibid.
164
Ibid.

54

framework grounded in empirical research, it departs from these other paradigms, which
have largely emerged from unscientific case study deconstruction.
165
Thus, SCCT can be
seen as predictive, whereas corporate Apologia and Image Repair Theory are merely
descriptive.
166
Indeed, Coombs takes his theoretical model a step further than the other
frameworks, offering a clearly defined two-step process and concrete guidelines for
assessing a given crisis’ reputational threat, which in turn influences and ultimately
determines the most appropriate response strategy that will maximize reputational
protection. It is important to note, “[a] threat is the amount of damage a crisis could
inflict on the organization’s reputation if no action is taken.”
167

According to SCCT, organizations must first characterize the crisis they are
facing as one of the three aforementioned clusters, victim, accidental or preventable, to
establish an initial crisis responsibility level. Consistent with attribution theory, Coombs’
taxonomy separates crises according to the organization’s perceived responsibility, which
is essentially how much stakeholders believe organizational actions caused the crisis, and
is relatively consistent within each category. The victim frame presents an organization
as a victim of the crisis, and therefore has the weakest attribution of responsibility,
producing a relatively mild reputational threat. Accidental crises imply moderate
attributions of responsibility and pose equally modest reputational threats, since these
crisis events are considered uncontrollable or unintentional.
168

Crises that fall within the preventable category are the result purposeful and
intentional actions. Preventable crises signal a high level of organizational culpability,
which generates a severe reputational threat. According to Coombs, by identifying a

165
Ibid., 171.
166
Coombs, “Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis,” 170.
167
Ibid., 166.
168
Ibid., 168.

55

given crisis situation as of one the three aforementioned frames, organizations can predict
with remarkable accuracy how stakeholders will form attributions of organizational
responsibility.
169
Moreover, as mentioned above, crisis responsibility is inversely related
to organizational reputation. Still, “in most cases, the news media is the final arbitrator of
the crisis frames. The frames used in the news media reports are the frames that most
stakeholders will experience and adopt. That is why it is critical that crisis managers
present 'their side of the story' to the news media.”
170

Second, organizations must assess the potential reputational impact of the crisis,
which is a function of four variables: performance history, prior relational reputation,
veracity of evidence and the level of damage associated with the crisis.
171
Taken together,
these dimensions serve as intensifying factors for the reputational threat posed by a crisis.
In terms of performance history, organizations with records of positive past performance
may be better equipped to overcome crises, as stakeholders will be more inclined to
forgive the misconduct, dismissing it as anomalous.
172
It is in this way that positive
performance histories endow organizations with enduring credibility, which can be
mobilized to diffuse crisis situations.
Coombs uses the term “the halo effect” to refer to the protective powers of
favorable reputations. He argues that a positive performance history can be a valuable
resource during a crisis, tantamount to a kind of reputational capital.
173
Although it will
not appear on an organization’s balance sheet, a positive reputation is undoubtedly an
invaluable intangible asset. Coombs explains that a favorable pre-crisis reputation acts as

169
Ibid.
170
Ibid., 171.
171
Coombs, “Choosing the Right Words,” 454.
172
Ibid., 460.

173
Coombs, W. Timothy and Sherry J. Holladay, “Unpacking the Halo Effect: Reputation and Crisis Management," Journal of
Communication Management 10, no. 2 (2006): 125.
56

a halo in two ways. First, it serves as a buffer or shield when a crisis strikes, lessening the
attendant damage.
174
Revisiting the reputational capital analogy, an organization with
robust reputational assets can afford to expend some of these amassed reserves in a crisis,
while still preserving a positive image once it has been resolved. As Alsop explains,
“They [organizations] build up “reputation capital” to tide them over in turbulent times.
It’s like opening a savings account for a rainy day. If a crisis strikes . . . reputation suffers
less and rebounds more quickly.”
175
Second, as mentioned above, stakeholders with
positive opinions of an organization will be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt,
discounting negative information related to the crisis and assigning weaker attributions of
responsibility for the event.
176

By contrast, organizations with negative performance histories are subject to an
opposing phenomenon called the Velcro effect, which compounds the crisis’ potential
reputational threat.
177
These organizations not only lack the reputational capital necessary
to buffer the effects of a crisis, but their problematic histories also attract additional
reputational damage, much in the same was as Velcro latches onto fabric.
178
Unfavorable
prior reputations signal a lack of credibility and trustworthiness on the part of the
organization. Additionally, the presence of existing negative information causes
stakeholders to assign further attributions of responsibility to the organization.
179
Thus, a
history of similar problems makes the existing crisis appear as part of a larger pattern of
irresponsible behavior.
There are times when stakeholders know very little about the crisis-afflicted

174
Ibid., 125.
175
Ibid., 124
176
Ibid., 125.
177
Ibid., 126.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid.

57

organization. In such instances, the organization can be said to possess a neutral
performance history. This can be advantageous since the widespread public attention in
crisis situations presents unique opportunities for organizations to fashion positive
reputations from scratch.
180
Having said that, organizations with neutral performance
histories neither benefit nor suffer from the halo and Velcro effects, respectively.
Conversely, prior relational reputation can be defined as the quality of the
relationships organizations have established with their stakeholders. An organization’s
relational reputation is positive if it is perceived to have treated stakeholders well in the
past.
181
Thus, positive interactions with key publics cultivate favorable relational
reputations. Alternatively, an unfavorable prior relational reputation emerges from a
history of unpleasant organization-stakeholder interactions, which depletes reputational
capital.
182
If organizations have mistreated their stakeholders in other contexts, the crisis
cannot be framed as an isolated incident and becomes another example of organizational
wrongdoing among many.
“Veracity of evidence refers to the proof of whether or not a crisis event occurred.
Evidence can be true, false, or ambiguous.”
183
True evidence proves beyond any doubt,
reasonable or otherwise, that a crisis occurred.
184
The video footage of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks is an example of true evidence. False evidence is akin to rumors.
185
The FDA alert
issued in response to the Pepsi tampering hoax illustrates that false evidence sometimes
originates from even the most reputable sources. Ambiguous evidence is only relevant in
Coombs’ faux pas category of crises as they involve questions of morality and ethics with

180
Coombs, “Choosing the Right Words,” 460.
181
Coombs, “Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis,” 167.
182
Ibid.
183
Coombs, “Choosing the Right Words,” 458.
184
Ibid.
185
Ibid.

58

no conclusive answers.
186

The final factor that determines a given crisis’ reputational threat is the level of
damage caused by the event. Damage is the common thread of every crisis situation and
crises vary tremendously in terms of the type and amount of damage they inflict.
187

Indeed, they can leave physical, financial, environmental, psychological and structural
damage in their wake. Moreover, the damage can affect the organization itself, its
stakeholder publics or, more often than not, both.
188
Crisis-related damage ranges from
minor to severe. While the degree of damage produced by a crisis is always subject to
interpretation, as a general rule of thumb, serious injuries, deaths, substantial property or
environmental harm and major financial losses all constitute severe damage, whereas
minor damage involves no loss of life, insignificant injuries, little or no property or
environmental destruction and minimal disruption of operations. “Because public
perceptions are tied to media reports, media definitions of the severity of the crisis are
critical.”
189
Stakeholders’ attributions of organizational responsibility for a given crisis
event increases in proportion to the severity of the damage.
190

Taken together, negative crisis histories, unfavorable relational reputations,
unambiguous veracity of evidence and severe damage amount to greater assessments of a
crisis’ reputational threat, and vice versa.
191
Thus, a victim crisis may produce the same
amount of reputational damage as one that is considered accidental in the presence of the
four intensifying factors. The same can be said for accidental and preventable crises.
Therefore, if either or both of an organization’s performance history or relational

186
Ibid.
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid., 459.
189
Ibid.
190
Ibid.
191
Coombs, “The Protective Powers of Crisis Response Strategies,” 245.
59

reputation are negative, or if the damage produced by a crisis is severe, the crisis manager
should regard the crisis as if it were in the next category.
192
“For instance, a crisis in the
victim cluster is treated as if it is in the accidental cluster and a crisis in the accidental
cluster is treated as if it is in the preventable cluster.”
193

Coombs offers a series of guidelines for selecting the appropriate crisis response
strategy based on the nature of the crisis event and the potential reputational threat
generated by it. His empirically-derived matching process serves to maximize the
protective powers of a given response strategy. The logic behind the defensive potential
of Coombs’ crisis communication strategies is threefold. First, they influence
stakeholders’ attributions of responsibility for the crisis. Second, they help to shape or
alter perceptions of the crisis-afflicted organization. Finally, they work to attenuate the
negative consequences of a crisis.
194

If no crisis has occurred, or the alleged crisis is the product of unfounded rumors,
and the organization has irrefutable proof of its nonexistence, the crisis manager should
employ a deny strategy.
195
For any other form of crisis within the victim cluster, the
organization is only required to provide instructing information, assuming there is no
negative performance history, unfavorable relational reputations, veracity of evidence
and the damage caused by the crisis is relatively mild.
196
In other words, victim crises do
not require any of the aforementioned response strategies outlined by Coombs, since they
do not constitute egregious violations of social norms or stakeholder expectations and
attributions of organizational responsibility for the event are minimal. Nevertheless,

192
Ibid.
193
Ibid.
194
Coombs, “Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis,” 171.
195
Coombs, “The Protective Powers of Crisis Response Strategies,” 249.
196
Ibid.

60

while not obligatory, for workplace violence, product tampering, natural disasters and
rumors, the crisis manager may elect to apply a victimage approach in addition to
providing instructing information.
197
As mentioned above, this is a secondary crisis
response strategy that must be used in conjunction with another communicative approach
and involves informing or reminding key publics of the suffering the organization has
endured as a result of the crisis to earn their sympathy.
When crises within the victim cluster occur in the presence of a negative prior
relational reputation, a history of similar problems, unequivocal veracity of evidence or
the damage is severe, the diminish response strategies of excuses and justifications are
most appropriate. Similarly, these two approaches can be utilized for crisis situations that
fall under Coombs’ accidental banner, provided they lack all of the four aforementioned
intensifying factors. If they do not, the rebuild crisis response strategies of compensation
and apology should be used. These are also the tactics Coombs recommends for the
preventable cluster of crises, irrespective of performance history, prior relational
reputation, strength of evidence, and level of damage.
198

He also submits a final, overarching guideline for selecting crisis response
strategies. Specifically, Coombs emphasizes that crisis managers must “maintain
consistency in crisis response strategies. Mixing deny crisis response strategies with
either the diminish or rebuild strategies will erode the effectiveness of the overall
response.”
199
Thus, as can be garnered from the SCCT guidelines, victim crises align with
deny response strategies, accidental crises pair with the diminish postures, whereas
rebuild strategies defend against preventable crises. Moreover, similar to the way in

197
Coombs, “Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis,” 173.
198
Ibid.
199
Ibid.

61

which the four intensifying factors cause a given crisis situation to be interpreted as a
member of the next strongest cluster, they also mandate the use of an approach derived
from the succeeding category of response strategies.
Given that the SCCT crisis response strategies become progressively stronger and
appear to offer greater reputational protection as one moves from one category to the
next, it would be easy to infer that the rebuild strategies are always the safest approach.
200

Nevertheless, the crisis manager must consider the cost of employing one approach over
another. To that end, the various SCCT response strategies also become increasingly
more expensive for organizations to implement as they move from deny to diminish to
rebuild.
201
In addition, “research has demonstrated that using overly accommodative
strategies produces no greater reputational benefits than those prescribed by SCCT.
Management pays more for the response but does not see an increased yield in reputation
protection.”
202
In fact, employing a stronger approach than is necessary to manage a crisis
can actually exacerbate the situation and increase the reputational damage generated by
the crisis, as stakeholders will believe the crisis is worse than they imagined if it merits
such an aggressive response.
203

Staged Approach to Crisis Management
The developmental or staged approach to crisis management is based on the idea
that crises have distinct life cycles and evolve according to a predictable sequence of
events.
204
Several communication scholars have developed models for crisis management
consistent with this logic, dividing the crisis cycle into discrete stages with corresponding

200
Ibid., 172.
201
Ibid.
202
Ibid.
203
Ibid., 173.

204
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 6.
62

communication implications and prescribed management functions for each phase. While
these various frameworks differ in terms of the number stages they identify, they all
highlight key moments in the crisis lifecycle that require specific managerial
competencies.
Steven Fink is arguably the forefather of the stage approach to crisis management.
He posited one of the oldest developmental crisis models in his 1986 book, Crisis
Management: Planning for the Inevitable. His is a four-stage model that applies a
medical metaphor to structure the crisis management process and demarcate one phase in
the crisis life cycle from another, which squares rather well with Hippocrates’ definition
of crisis.
205
Fink conceptualizes a crisis as if it were a disease.
206
As such, he defines
crisis as “a fluid, unstable, dynamic situation – just like an illness…with both an illness
and a crisis, things are in a constant state of flux.”
207

According to Fink, the earliest stage in the crisis life cycle is the prodromal phase.
Derived from the medical concept of a prodrome, an early symptom indicating the
outbreak of a disease, Fink likens this stage to a warning period.
208
The prodromal phase
is characterized by early indications signaling a potential crisis. Nevertheless, these
warning signs are often difficult to detect and may go unnoticed by organizational actors.
Still, those who can successfully identify the symptoms of a crisis have the ability to
preemptively intervene and correct course to avert its onset.
209
Even if the crisis cannot
be entirely forestalled, early detection creates a strategic advantage that simplifies the
management process by allowing for adequate preparation, reducing the severity of a

205
Ibid., 7.
206
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 33.
207
Ibid., 34.
208
Ibid.
209
Ibid.

63

crisis once it actually occurs.
210
It is in this way that the prodromal phase facilitates a
proactive approach to crisis management. Fink also acknowledges that some crises may
bypass the prodromal phase altogether, particularly in instances when prodromes only
become evident in hindsight.
211

The second stage in Fink’s crisis lifecycle is the acute phase, which he describes
as “the point of no return.”
212
It is in this phase that the crisis is triggered along with its
attendant damage. The success of crisis communication efforts in the acute phase is
heavily dependent on the level of anticipation and planning afforded by the prodromal
stage.
213
Fink maintains that the speed and intensity with which a crisis unfolds may
preclude the possibility of its effective management.
214
The acute stage is characterized
by critical decision-making on the part of organizational leadership, who must begin
responding to media inquiries, consider possible solutions and decide whether or not to
activate the crisis plan. Moreover, it is generally time-bound; observers can usually
pinpoint a precise date and time on which the crisis occurred.
The chronic phase, the third stage of Fink’s model, is a time of “recovery, of self
analysis, or self-doubt, and of healing,” involving extensive efforts at damage control.
215

Fink stresses that the chronic stage has no time limit.
216
It can span months, years or, in
extreme cases, the better part of a decade. The length of the chronic phase is partially a
function of the relative effectiveness of the crisis management activities implemented in
the preceding two stages. Its duration may also be unrelated to crisis management, as in
cases marked by protracted litigation. Some of the lingering effects of the crisis may still

210
Ibid.
211
Ibid.
212
Ibid.
213
Ibid.
214
Ibid.
215
Ibid., 35.
216
Ibid.

64

be felt during the chronic stage; however, they tend to attenuate with time and continued
management. Fink’s fourth and final stage is the resolution phase, where the “patient is
well and whole again.”
217
It is the ultimate goal of crisis management, the point at which
the crisis is resolved.
218
In the resolution phase, the crisis is longer a pressing concern and
a return to normalcy ensues.
Alternatively, Mitroff identifies five stages in the crisis lifecycle and management
process, assigning prescribed communicative actions and managerial competencies to
each phase. The first stage is signal detection. Similar to Fink’s prodromal stage, signal
detection involves identifying the early warning signs of crisis and taking action to
prevent it. The second stage is probing and prevention, whereby an organization actively
seeks out crisis risk factors to attenuate their potential for harm. This period is followed
by damage containment, the phase that succeeds the onset of crisis, in which
organizational actors attempt to limit the extent of the damage posed by the crisis.
Recovery, Mitroff’s fourth stage, is when organizations have successfully dealt with the
crisis and can return to normal business operations.
219

He also includes a fifth phase overlooked by Fink’s model, namely: learning. The
learning stage is a time of self-reflection, when organizational leadership evaluates and
critiques their crisis communication efforts to inform and ultimately improve future crisis
planning and management efforts.
220
Thus, Mitroff’s model is largely prescriptive while
Fink’s errs on the side of description.
221
The learning phase feeds back into the signal

217
Ibid.
218
Ibid.
219
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 8.
220
Ibid.
221
Ibid., 9.

65

detection stage, thereby restarting the crisis cycle.
222
Still, it can be argued that Mitroff’s
model is anachronistic, as organizations ought to search for potential crisis risk factors in
advance of the manifestation of crisis warning signs.
Fink’s four-phase crisis lifecycle, Mitroff’s five-stage model and other similar
crisis developmental schemes like Turner’s six-stage sequence of failure in foresight have
been synthesized into a macro three-stage analytical framework for understanding and
managing crises. This meta-model, which has no claim of authorship, simplifies the crisis
lifecycle and management process into three broad stages: pre-crisis, crisis and post-
crisis.
223
The pre-crisis stage integrates the activities involved in Fink’s prodromal and
Mitroff’s signal detection and probing and prevention phases to capture all of the discrete
aspects of crisis prevention and planning.
224
It is also something of an incubation period,
a time when the early warning signs of crisis may be perceived.
225
Coombs emphasizes
that organizations manage crises more effectively when they have a plan, a designated
management team, pre-crafted messages and conduct crisis drills at least on an annual
basis.
226
These best practices for crisis management allow for faster response times and
better decision-making in times of crisis. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, organizations
sensitive to the early indications of crises may be able to prevent their occurrence.
The second stage, crisis, is equivalent to Fink’s acute and Mitroff’s damage
control stages, and requires recognition and containment on the part of the
organization.
227
In terms of recognition, organizations must realize a crisis exists.
228
The
damage implicit in times of crisis will generally expedite the recognition process.

222
Ibid.
223
Ibid., 9-10.
224
Ibid., 10.
225
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 31.
226
Coombs, “Crisis Management and Communications.”
227
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 10.
228
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 31.

66

Containment refers to the organization’s crisis response efforts, including message
development and dissemination, information distribution and reputation management, as
they attempt to return to normal operations.
229
Containment is essentially damage control,
diminishing threats to the organization’s survival.
The third stage collapses crisis recovery and learning into a macro post-crisis
phase.
230
This period begins when a crisis is deemed to be over. The post-crisis stage is a
learning experience, in which organizational actors attempt to understand why the crisis
occurred to prevent a recurrence.
231
Furthermore, in addition to sourcing the geneses of
crises, organizations assess their crisis management performance and adjust their plans
accordingly, generating new policies, procedures, norms and behaviors.
232
While a
resolved crisis no longer demands the full attention of organizational leadership, they
must still perform follow-up communication activities for both internal and external
stakeholders in the form of updates on the recovery process, information on corrective
actions and details of formal investigations.
233
The cyclical nature of the crisis lifecycle
implies that crisis management is an ongoing process, and that organizations that
frequently experience crises will be better equipped to handle them in the future.

229
Coombs, Ongoing Crisis Communication, 10.
230
Ibid.
231
Seeger and Sellnow, Theorizing Crisis Communication, 32.
232
Coombs, “Crisis Management and Communications.”
233
Ibid.

67

Chapter V: Research Methodology
Interview Methodology
For the purpose of this project, the author conducted a semi-structured, in-depth
interview with an experienced PR professional.
In semi-structured interviews, the researcher prepares certain lines of questioning
in advance but need not adhere to these themes religiously, and can pose follow-up
questions as he or she sees fit. The use of this technique allowed for the development of a
more profound understanding of the themes and phenomena under investigation. More
specifically, the use of open-ended questions and the flexibility afforded by this
methodological choice enabled the author to pursue topics in greater depth and to explore
questions and subjects that were not anticipated a priori.
The researcher interviewed Glenn Bunting, President and Founder of
G.F.BUNTING+CO (GFBC), a strategic communications agency headquartered in San
Francisco, California. Prior to founding his eponymous practice, Bunting worked as the
Managing Director of Los Angeles-based crisis PR firm Sitrick and Company (SC), later
promoted to Executive Vice President. SC is “known for its celebrated and controversial
clientele,” and for “representing clients ensnared in scandal,” while Sitrick himself has
been billed the “King of Crisis PR.”
234
Bunting was also an award-winning investigative
editor and reporter for the better part of three decades before joining the public relations
field. Thus, his particular background qualifies Mr. Bunting as a subject matter expert in
the area of crisis communication. Moreover, with insider knowledge of the inner
workings of the media, he is uniquely poised to comment on the media’s involvement in
crisis construction.

234
Michael Corkery, “Breaking News: Resources Buys P.R. Firm Sitrick And Company,” The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2009,
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/10/29/breaking-news-resources-buys-pr-firm-sitrick-and-company; Kim Christensen, “PR Guru's
Public Spat Over a Debt,” Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/oct/21/business/fi-sitrick21.
68

The interview was held over the phone at the discretion of Mr. Bunting, and lasted
approximately 30 minutes. The purpose of the interview and the study in general was
disclosed to Mr. Bunting to provide context. Final interview questions were constructed
in such a way as to elicit his opinions, beliefs, experiences and perceptions of
organizational crisis and the interplay between media and stakeholder discourses in
defining and labeling crises.
Bunting addressed the following topics: crisis rhetoric, and specifically its
overuse, misuse and mutability, defining crisis, crisis trends, and crisis planning or
management. Finally, in interpreting the data from the interview, this study takes
abductive reasoning as its inferential framework. “Abduction refers to the process of
moving from the everyday descriptions and meanings given by people, to categories and
concepts that create the basis of an understanding or an explanation to the phenomenon
described.”
235
Hence, Mr. Bunting’s ideas, thoughts and experiences were used to
formulate a theory about how organizational crises come into being and the political,
interpretive and sense-making activities involved in this process.
Case Study Methodology
One case study was conducted for the purpose of this paper. The pool of available
cases was restricted to corporate crises, as opposed to those affecting individuals, non-
profits and public institutions. The decision to focus exclusively on corporate crises was
motivated by three factors: “a) the increasing mass media reporting of hazards and their
attendant risks, b) the phenomenal growth in the number of product-liability lawsuits,
particularly since 1975, and c) the pervasive, enormous impact of business crises on more

235
Päivi Eriksson and Anne Kovalainen, Qualitative Methods in Business Research (London: Sage, 2008), 23.
69

than the reputations and the financial and social status of businesses.”
236
Still, the process
of case selection was complicated by a relatively large number of appropriate candidates;
therefore additional screening criteria were applied to narrow the list.
In general, corporate crises were eligible for case study analysis if they 1)
occurred within the last year, 2) produced fatalities, 3) received extensive media
coverage, public interest and attention, and 4) posed a threat, real or perceived, to the
afflicted organization’s reputation and high priority goals. Moreover, to further restrict
the sampling pool, only crises affecting US-based companies were considered. The
vetting of candidate cases according to the abovementioned parameters yielded just two
possible options, The Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise Crash and the GM Ignition Switch
Recalls. The Virgin Galactic crisis was removed from consideration, as it occurred too
recently to permit a comprehensive investigation. Thus, the GM crisis was analyzed
according to case study methodology.
Content Analysis Methodology
Two distinct content analyses were conducted to gather the relevant data required
to answer the stated research questions. First, a content analysis of the news releases
issued by GM in the wake of the ignition switch recalls was performed to analyze how
the company framed or defined the crisis in comparison to how it was portrayed in the
mainstream media. To provide a point of comparison, news stories on the event from five
major newspapers, specifically The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los
Angeles Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, were selected due to the
national distribution and pervasive influence of these publications. They represent five of

236
Alfonso González Herrero and Cornelius B. Pratt, “An Integrated Symmetrical Model for Crisis-Communications Management,”
Journal of Public Relations Research 8, no. 2 (1996): 79-80.
70

the top ten daily metropolitan newspapers in terms of circulation, according to the
Alliance for Audited Media.
237
Since GM is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, The
Detroit Free Press was also included as a news source. The expectation was that the Free
Press would have covered the crisis extensively, given the involvement of a Detroit-based
multinational corporation. Moreover, articles were drawn from web-based business news
publications such as Forbes and Business Insider since they represent the sources most
likely to cover the crisis from an organization-focused rather than human interest-focused
perspective.
The sampling units for the first content analysis included the press releases
retrieved from GM’s official website as well as articles from the abovementioned news
publications on the subject of the ignition switch recalls. GM announced its first round of
recalls related to the ignition switch defect on February 7, 2014. The content analyses
cover the seven-month period following the event, ending on September 7, 2014. Since
there is no feasible way of determining a precise date marking the end of the crisis, this
research looked at content published in the aforementioned time period to obtain a
representative sample of analysis. Given the fact that the company issued additional
recalls in January 2015, the crisis appears to be ongoing.
Accordingly, the rationale behind this relatively protracted time frame is twofold.
First, GM issued several successive waves of recalls related to the ignition switch defect
following the initial announcement, which had the effect of reviving the crisis. Second,
the company took a while to initiate its crisis management and intervention measures, and
therefore a longer analytical period was deemed necessary to account for the full range of

237
The Associated Press, “Top 10 Newspapers By Circulation: Wall Street Journal Leads Weekday Circulation,” The Huffington Post,
July 1, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/newspaper-circulation-top-10_n_3188612.html.
71

its crisis response efforts. A content analysis of all the media content related to the recalls
would require a time commitment and massive resources beyond the scope of this
project.
The message pool of news releases issued by GM in response to the crisis did not
represent a census of all attainable messages, since many of its communication efforts in
the selected time frame were not directly relevant to the ignition switch defect.
Accordingly, the sampling frame was narrowed to 26 messages that could be linked to
the ignition switch recalls, of which all were analyzed. The company’s Facebook posts
and tweets published within this time frame were not considered since, for the most part,
they were unrelated to the recalls, and those that were only served to drive traffic to the
press releases distributed on GM’s official website.

Figure 2: GM Tweet from Sampling Period.
238

Given the aforementioned impracticality of analyzing all news stories about the
event published in the selected publications within the designated time frame, a non-
random convenience sampling method was employed. The articles were selected for
analysis in the following manner: The LexisNexis academic search engine database
accessed via the USC Library website was used to gather news stories from the major
national newspapers. The search term “GM Recall” yielded 991 news stories, or 34 when
refined by date range and selecting for the abovementioned five newspapers. An
additional six stories were drawn from the Google news aggregator. In total, 66 sampling

238
General Motors, Twitter Post, March 28, 2014, 4:27 p.m., https://twitter.com/GM/status/449689193338662912.
72

units were coded. The purpose of the first content analysis exercise was to determine how
GM framed the event relative to the mainstream media. In other words, did the media
accept or reject the organizational accounts of the crisis or reframe it entirely?
Ultimately, the intention was to uncover the frequency with which the word crisis
was used and which entity among those examined would be most inclined to use it. The
author performed a manifest message evaluation, analyzing elements physically present
in the sampling units and, therefore, countable. Accordingly, the recording units were
individual words, coded for frequency rather than existence. In practice, this means that
the word crisis, for example, would be counted as many times as it appears in a given
text, resulting in a frequency distribution. Thus, repeated word usage signals the relative
importance of a particular term.
Furthermore, an emergent approach to coding was employed, as opposed to a
priori coding. In the former, coding categories are “developed by a close textual analysis
of a small sample of randomly selected articles, often as few as 10%. The remaining
articles are analyzed based on the presence of these codes.”
239
A priori coding, by
contrast, involves establishing coding categories in advance of textual analysis.
240
Six
sampling units were randomly drawn from the message pool to discover the words and
terms most commonly used as substitutes for the crisis event. This formed the following
coding categories: “Incident,” “Tragedy,” “Accident,” “Crisis,” “Event,” “Disaster,”
“Emergency,” “Situation,” “Issue,” “Problem,” and “Scandal.”
Finally, the context unit was established as the sentence that contained the coded
word. The importance of context in content analysis cannot be overstated. If words are

239
Don W. Stacks and David Michaelson, A Practitioner's Guide to Public Relations Research, Measurement and Evaluation (New
York: Business Expert Press, 2010): 89-90.
240
Ibid., 84.

73

coded exactly as they appear, this may undermine the validity of the data in instances
where the same word is used multiples times, albeit with alternate meanings. For
example, if one were to use the search function of a word processor or web browser to
determine the frequency of the word “event” in a particular sampling unit, it may appear
within an irrelevant context such as “in the event of” or “eventually.” Thus, each sentence
in which the coded words appeared was read to ensure the validity of the data as well as
the validity of the inferences drawn therefrom.
Using the same message pool of news releases, a second content analysis was
conducted to identify the crisis response strategies employed by GM in the wake of the
ignition switch recalls. The news stories published in the mainstream media were omitted
from consideration, as they did not contain information in reference to GM’s crisis
communication efforts. The sampling units were therefore the aforementioned 26
company press releases. The recording units were modified and broadened from words to
sentences to accommodate a latent message analysis, in which “key messages are
developed based on communication objectives. These communication objectives are
“translated” into codes that become the basis of the analysis.”
241
It is in this way that a
latent content analysis examines what can be inferred from the sampling units, rather than
what can be objectively seen.
The researcher applied an a priori coding approach, establishing exhaustive
coding categories through a synthesis of Coombs’ SCCT crisis response strategies and
those espoused in Benoit’s Image Repair Theory. This yielded the following categories:
“Apology,” “Scapegoat,” “Regret,” “Compensation,” “Denial,” “Ingratiation,”
“Justification,” “Concern,” “Instruction,” “Victimage,” “Reminder,” “Assurance,” and

241
Ibid., 90.
74

“Corrective Action.” Within each sampling unit, the organization’s crisis response
strategies were coded for existence. Moreover, since GM could employ more than one
response tactic at a time in a given text, they were not coded as mutually exclusive.
Content Analysis Research Questions
The following research questions formulated from the literature review above
were posed to guide the two content analyses. Each question corresponds to a separately
conducted content analysis study.
RQ1: How did General Motors frame or define the ignition switch recall relative to the
mainstream media?
RQ2: Which crisis response strategies, if any, did General Motors employ in managing
the ignition switch recall?

75

Chapter VI: General Motors Crisis Case Study
Timeline of Events
On February 7, 2014, General Motors (NYSE: GM) announced a recall of
800,000 of its Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5 vehicles due to ignition switch
failures.
242
This would be the first in a series of recalls linked to the ignition problem,
which caused the cars’ engines to shut off while in motion, disabled power steering and
braking capabilities, and also prevented airbag deployment in the event of an accident.
243

In late February, the company announced its second wave of recalls, involving
approximately 750,000 vehicles.
244
An additional 1.5 million cars, mostly vans, sedans
and SUVS, were recalled less than three weeks later.
245
On March 28, 2014, GM
announced yet another recall of 800,000 vehicles, including all models of the Chevrolet
Cobalt and HHR, Pontiac G5 and Solstice, and the Saturn Ion and Sky, bringing the total
number of vehicles recalled for the ignition switch defect to just over two million.
246

In early April, the company issued a recall affecting an additional two million
automobiles.
247
On June 16, GM recalled 3.2 million more cars for the faulty ignition
switches, and an additional 6.5 million vehicles later that month.
248
The company
continued to issue recalls related to the ignition switch problems sporadically throughout
the second half of 2014, with the last one taking place on December 23.
249
These latter
recalls implicated roughly 350,000 cars.
250
The ignition switch crisis followed GM into

242
Ben Klayman, “GM Recalls 778,562 Compact Cars in North America for Ignition Issue,” Reuters, February 13, 2014,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/13/us-autos-gm-recall-idUSBREA1C0SJ20140213.
243
Ibid.
244
Tanya Basu, “Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect,” NPR, March 31, 2014,
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/297158876/timeline-a-history-of-gms-ignition-switch-defect.
245
Ibid.
246
Ibid.
247
Ibid.
248
Ibid.
249
General Motors, “GM Updates 2014 Recall Tally,” GM News, January 2, 2015,
http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2015/Jan/0102-recalls.html.
250
Ibid.
76

2015, with the company announcing another recall of almost 100,000 vehicles at the
beginning of January and an additional 80,000 in February.
251

GM’s ignition switch crisis was exacerbated when evidence surfaced alleging that
the company knew of the problem as far back as 2001, but failed to address it due to cost
concerns.
252
GM engineers apparently noticed that the ignition could be switched off
while the car was in motion if the key was weighed down or knocked out of place by a
driver’s knee or bumpy road conditions. Additional documents revealed that in 2005,
GM’s engineers received numerous reports about ignition switch failures and even held
meetings about it, but company executives ultimately concluded that a fix would be too
costly and time-consuming, particularly at a time when the company was in poor
financial health.
253
“Emails unearthed by Reuters suggested that the fix would have cost
GM 90 cents per car.”
254
Later in 2005, the company learned of the first death linked to
the defect.
255
Several months later, it issued a service bulletin about the defect to GM
dealers, but did not announce a recall for reasons untold.
256

In 2006, Delphi, the manufacturer of the ignition switch, implemented a redesign
to solve the defect, which was approved by GM engineering supervisor Ray DeGiorgio.
Nevertheless, in violation of auto industry protocol, the part number of the unit was left
unchanged.
257
“By failing to create a new part number for the re-designed ignition, GM

251
David Shepardson, “Recall Woes Follow GM into New Year,” The Detroit News, January 1, 2015,
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2015/01/01/gm-recalls-suvs-trucks-ignition-issue/21149405; Jeff
Bennett, “GM Recalls 81,000 Vehicles For Steering Issue,” The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2015,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-expands-recall-involving-steering-issue-1423926855.
252
Basu, “Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect.”
253
Sonari Glinton, “The Long Road To GM's Ignition Switch Recall,” NPR, March 31, 2014,
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/31/297312252/the-long-road-to-gms-ignition-switch-recall.
254
Brad Plumer, “The GM Recall Scandal of 2014,” Vox.com, May 11, 2015, http://www.vox.com/cards/gm-car-recall/what-did-gm-
do-about-the-ignition-switch.
255
Basu, “Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect.”
256
Ibid.
257
“GM Ignition Switch Recall Timeline,” Chicago Tribune, November 10, 2014,
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/chi-gm-ignition-switch-recall-timeline-htmlstory.html.

77

stymied its own engineers’ investigation into problems with the cars.”
258
Moreover, the
company could not differentiate the vehicles with faulty ignition switches from those that
had been fixed as they had identical serial codes, which caused some vehicles to receive
defective replacement switches when they were brought in for repairs.
259
In 2007, safety
regulators informed the company that the aforementioned fatal accident involved engine
and airbag deployment failure; however neither party launched a formal investigation.
260

That year, an independent investigation linked the ignition switch defect to another fatal
accident involving a Chevrolet Cobalt yet, once again, neither the company nor regulators
conducted an inquiry into the matter.
261

In 2011, Lance Cooper, a Georgia-based lawyer, started digging into the death of
a girl whose Cobalt shut off while she was driving, causing her to veer into oncoming
traffic.
262
His investigation was conducted on behalf of the girl’s parents, who elected to
sue the company, and he uncovered a host of evidence associated with the faulty ignition
switches through depositions with GM engineers.
263
While they eventually settled the
lawsuit out of court for an undisclosed sum, it attracted enough attention that other GM
car owners who had suffered similar accidents began making noise about their own
experiences.
264
In 2012, GM identified an additional eight crashes with four fatalities and
six injuries attributed to the defect.
265

258
Micheline Maynard, “The 'Cardinal Sin' That GM May Have Committed On Chevy Cobalt,” Forbes, March 24, 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2014/03/24/the-cardinal-sin-that-gm-may-have-committed-on-chevy-cobalt.
259
Plumer, “The GM Recall Scandal of 2014.”
260
Basu, “Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect.”
261
Ibid.
262
Plumer, “The GM Recall Scandal of 2014.”
263
Ibid.
264
Patrick G. Lee and Jeff Plungis, “GM Plagued as Georgia Lawyer Presses Regulators on Deaths,” Bloomberg, March 17, 2014,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-17/gm-plagued-as-georgia-lawyer-presses-regulators-on-deaths.
265
Basu, “Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect.”

78

In 2013, a company engineer testified that GM knew of the faulty ignition switch
but made a conscious “business decision not to fix this problem.”
266
By the end of that
year, GM concluded that the defect was responsible for 31 accidents involving at least 13
fatalities.
267
On December 18, 2013, two months before announcing the first wave of
recalls, the company placed an urgent order for half a million replacement ignition
switches.
268
Another key change was the appointment of Mary Barra, a GM lifer, as the
company’s first female CEO January 15, 2014.
269
GM claims that Barra first learned of
the ignition switch problem later that month.
270

There is considerable disagreement about how many fatalities occurred as a result
of the ignition switch defect. Early in the recall process, GM estimated the number of
deaths caused by the faulty part at 13 people.
271
Today, however, the company’s official
count has increased to 100 people, as reflected in the number of death claims GM has
deemed eligible for compensation.
272
Still, this figure may severely underestimate the
actual death toll since it “does not include anyone who was killed in the back seat of a car
with an ignition problem, because the company is only looking at victims who might
have been saved if an airbag had properly deployed.”
273
As of January 2015, GM had
received 4,345 claims for compensation, of which 479 were for death.
274

266
Ibid.
267
Ibid.
268
Jeff Bennett, “GM Ordered New Switches Long Before Recall,” The Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-ordered-new-switches-long-before-recall-1415584224.
269
Basu, “Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect.”
270
Ibid.
271
Chris Isidore, “Why GM Recall Death Toll Will Rise,” CNN Money, May 27, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/27/news/companies/gm-recall-deaths.
272
Chris Isidore, “GM Ignition Switch Death Toll Reaches 100,” CNN Money, May 12, 2015,
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/12/autos/gm-ignition-switch-recall-100-deaths.
273
Chris Isidore, “Why GM Recall Death Toll Will Rise.”
274
Ankit Ajmera, “GM Gets 33 More Claims for Faulty Ignition Switch Compensation,” Reuters, February 23, 2015,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/23/us-gm-recall-compensation-idUSKBN0LR1FM20150223.

79

Characterizing the Crisis
The ignition switch defect produced an unintentional crisis. Whether ultimately
the product of incompetence, negligence or parsimony, the part was not purposely
designed to fail. More precisely, GM’s ignition switch recalls constitute a product failure
crisis. As mentioned above, product failure alone is not enough for the manifestation of a
crisis, however, given that GM’s situation involved both product recalls and defects that
caused myriad deaths and injuries, the language of crisis is justified. Moreover, since GM
knew of the problem over a decade before initiating the first recall and, by extension,
knowingly placed its consumers at risk, the crisis falls within the preventable cluster and
can also be considered a transgression in accordance with Coombs’ aforementioned
taxonomies.
In accordance with SCCT, once the crisis event has been typified, the four
intensifying factors of prior relational reputation, performance history, veracity of
evidence, and level of damage must be considered to assess the potential reputational
threat posed by the event. It is very difficult to ascertain GM’s prior relational reputation.
Nevertheless, it is somewhat easier to gauge the company’s performance history before
the crisis. The 2013 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient study measured “the reputations of
the 60 most visible companies in the country across the six dimensions of corporate
reputation—emotional appeal, financial performance, products and services, social
responsibility, vision and leadership, and workplace environment.”
275
After surveying
over 14,000 people between November 13 and 30, 2012, the market research firm
assigned GM a score of 64.44, indicating a “poor” reputation.
276
Moreover, GM earned

275
“The Reputations of the Most Visible Companies,” Nielsen, April 29, 2014,
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2014/the-reputations-of-the-most-visible-companies.html.

276
“The Harris Poll 2013 RQ® Summary Report,” Harris Interactive, February 2013,
https://www.harrisinteractive.com/vault/2013%20RQ%20Summary%20Report%20FINAL.pdf.
80

something of a negative reputation associated with its Chapter 11 reorganization and
ensuing government bailout.
Still, GM has consistently ranked within the top three in the category of the
world’s largest automakers in terms of global sales volume. GM was the front-runner for
a staggering 77 years, longer than any other car manufacturer, until Toyota nabbed the
title in 2008.
277
GM reclaimed the throne in 2011, but has since vacillated between
second and third, occupying the latter position as of this year, with both the
aforementioned Japanese automaker and the Volkswagen Group outpacing its sales and
ranking first and second, respectively.
278
Nonetheless, GM remains the largest domestic
automaker in the US.
279
With reference to the company’s financials, according to the
Fortune Global 500, an annual ranking of the top 500 companies by revenue, GM is the
fourth most earning car company worldwide, surpassed by Toyota, Volkswagen and
Daimler.
280
The company had annual net sales and revenue of $155 billion in 2013.
281

Today, GM’s market capitalization is $57.76 billion.
282

There was an abundance of evidence in the ignition switch recall crisis, of varying
degrees of apparent veracity. First, there were the accounts of GM car owners involved in
accidents related to the ignition switch defect, particularly those who filed suit against the
company or made claims for compensation, which both required providing ample
documentation to substantiate their allegations.
283
In instances where a given car crash

277
Hans Greimel, “Toyota Tops VW to Remain World's Largest Automaker,” Automotive News, January 21, 2015,
http://europe.autonews.com/article/20150121/COPY/301219976/toyota-tops-vw-to-remain-worlds-largest-automaker.
278
Ibid.
279
Ibid.
280
“Global 500 2014,” Fortune, http://fortune.com/global500.
281
General Motors Co, Market Watch, http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/gm.
282
Ibid.
283
Mike Colias and Gabe Nelson, “Feinberg Details Eligibility for GM Ignition-switch Compensation,” Automotive News, June 30,
2014, http://www.autonews.com/article/20140630/OEM11/140639993/feinberg-details-eligibility-for-gm-ignition-switch-
compensation.

81

resulted in a fatality, the victim’s family supplied evidence on behalf of the deceased.
284

Second, the company surrendered hundreds of thousands of internal documents to U.S.
congressional investigators, regulatory authorities, federal prosecutors, and the attorneys
of the various plaintiffs suing GM. Furthermore, an internal investigation conduced by
former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas analyzed 23 terabytes of data obtained from GM, or
41 million documents, in addition to conducting interviews with 230 witnesses.
285
The
trove of documents revealed countless smoking guns proving the defect was brought to
GM’s attention many times since 2001. Finally, the aforementioned service bulletin GM
sent to its dealers notifying them of the problem and email exchanges obtained by the
Wall Street Journal and Reuters citing the abovementioned ignition switch fix cost and
urgent replacement order testify to the company’s conscious culpability.
With reference to level of damage, the ignition switch recall crisis primarily
generated physical damage, specifically the abovementioned deaths and injuries. The
crisis also caused GM to incur secondary financial losses in the form of fines, recall
expenses, as well as costs associated with victim compensation. Thus, the presence of
three out of four intensifiers exacerbates the reputational damage posed by the crisis,
which is already considerable given its categorization as a preventable crisis, eliciting the
highest attributions of organizational responsibility. Faced with an identical crisis
situation, Coombs would recommend employing the rebuild crisis response strategies of
compensation and apology. Whether either company heeded this sage wisdom will be
addressed in the following section.

284
Ibid.
285
Alexandra Kaptik, “The Numbers: GM’s Valukas Report,” The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2014,
http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2014/06/05/gms-valukas-report-the-numbers.
82

Crisis Management and Communication Efforts
For the first two months following the initial ignition switch recall, GM relied
exclusively on official media statements as its only form of crisis communication. In
other words, the company was completely silent on its social media channels, published
no news releases on its website and Mary Barra herself did not speak publicly on the
matter. In its early statements, GM claimed that the crashes associated with the defect
resulted in six deaths and “occurred off-road and at high speeds, where the probability of
serious or fatal injuries was high regardless of air bag deployment.”
286
The company also
highlighted alcohol and a failure to wear seat belts as contributing factors in some of the
deadly accidents.
287
In doing so, it attempted to shift the blame for the collisions from
GM to the accident victims, thereby rendering them scapegoats. Within this same time
frame, GM North American President Alan Batey apologized on behalf of the company
while spokesman Alan Adler employed excuse and justification response strategies in
asserting that the reason GM did not recall the cars sooner was because the rate of
problems per 1,000 vehicles was relatively low.
288

Mary Barra issued her first public statement on March 4.
289
On March 7, the
company sent recall letters to registered GM car owners, providing ignition switch repair
information and urging them to remove all items from their key rings except for the key
itself.
290
Nevertheless, GM staunchly maintained that the recalled cars were safe to drive

286
Jerry Hirsch, “GM Recalls Chevrolet Cobalt, Pontiac G5 After Fatal Accidents,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2014,
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/13/autos/la-fi-hy-gm-recall-chevrolet-cobalt-20140213.
287
Ibid.
288
General Motors, “GM Expands Ignition Switch Recall,” GM News. February 25, 2014,
http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/Feb/0225-ion.html; Tom Krisher, “GM Boosts
Faulty Ignition Switch Recall to 1.6 Million Cars,” Daily Finance, February 26, 2015, http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/02/26/gm-
boosts-faulty-ignition-switch-recall/#!slide=977112.
289
Chris Isidore and Peter Valdes-Dapena, “Mary Barra Defends GM’s Recall Response,” CNN Money, March 4, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/04/news/companies/barra-gm-recall.
290
Wald, Matthew L. “Now Comes Hard Part for G.M.: The Repairs.” The New York Times. March 9, 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/business/now-comes-hard-part-for-gm-the-repairs.html.
83

if these additional items were detached.
291
Barra made a follow-up statement in the form
of a video apology for the crisis two weeks later, “calling it a tragic situation in which
"terrible things happened."
292
Soon after, GM hired Anton Valukas, who earlier probed
the Lehman Brothers Holdings bankruptcy, to lead the company’s internal investigation
into the ignition switch failure.
293
It also appointed GM veteran Jeff Boyer as Vice
President of Global Vehicle Safety, a newly created position.
294
GM insisted Boyer
would have the resources and authority to "to quickly identify and resolve product safety
issues."
295
Several weeks later, the company offered a $500 cash allowance toward the
purchase or lease of a new GM car to the owners of the recalled vehicles, as well as
reimbursement for previous ignition switch repairs.
296
GM also launched a crisis-
dedicated website around this time, where owners could get more information about the
recalls.
297
The online recall portal allowed GM car owners to enter their vehicle
identification number into the system to determine if their cars were subject to a recall.
On March 31, Mary Barra met with the families of 11 people who died as a result
of the defect to apologize for the company’s delay in issuing a recall.
298
The following
day, she appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce
Committee for what would be her first of four congressional hearings. In her testimony,
Barra said, "today's GM will do the right thing. That begins with my sincere apologies to

291
Ibid.
292
Chris Isidore, “Barra on Recall: ‘Terrible Things Happened’,” CNN Money, March 18, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/17/news/companies/gm-recall-barra.
293
Jeff Green and Jeff Plungis, “GM Picks Former Lehman Investigator Valukas to Lead Probe,” Bloomberg, March 10, 2014,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-10/gm-picks-former-lehman-investigator-valukas-to-lead-probe.
294
General Motors, “GM Announces New Vehicle Safety Chief,” GM News, March 18, 2014,
http://media.gm.com/Pages/news/us/en/2014/mar/0318-boyer.html.
295
Ibid.
296
Mike Colias, “GM Offers $500 Discount, Free Loaners to Owners of Recalled Cars,” Automotive News, March 12, 2014,
http://www.autonews.com/article/20140312/RETAIL/140319930/gm-offers-$500-discount-free-loaners-to-owners-of-recalled-cars.
297
Jeff Bennett and Joseph B. White, “Congress to Investigate GM Recall,” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304020104579431141203677528.

298
Jeff Bennett, “GM’s Mary Barra Meets With Families of Victims,” The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304157204579473940845171608.
84

everyone who has been affected by this recall, especially the families and friends (of
those) who lost their lives or were injured. I am deeply sorry."
299
Furthermore, she
pledged full transparency and highlighted various changes and new initiatives the
company had established in the wake of the recalls.
300
More specifically, GM hired
lawyer Kenneth Feinberg to independently create and administer a victim compensation
fund.
301
Feinberg had significant experience in this area; he oversaw the payouts related
to the World Trade Center attacks, the BP oil spill and the Boston Marathon Bombing.
302

Barra also revealed that the company had suspended DeGiorgio and Gary Altman,
GM’s chief development engineer.
303
She admitted that DeGiorgio had lied under oath
when he denied authorizing Delphi’s redesign.
304
It is important to note that throughout
her testimony, Barra repeatedly referred to the company as “the new GM.”
305
In doing so,
she attempted to distance GM from its prior misconduct. She “admitted the company had
been operating under a cost culture in the days before the 2009 bankruptcy, but said today
it is operating under a customer culture."
306
The next day, GM hired crisis management
adviser Jeff Eller, who represented Firestone in its tire recall controversy.
307

The following week at an employee town hall meeting, Barra announced the
creation of GM’s Speak Up for Safety campaign, effectively a whistle-blower program

299
James R. Healey, “GM’s Barra Apologizes to Families in Testimony,” USA Today, April 1, 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/03/31/barra-remarks-house-recall/7118161.
300
Ibid.
301
Gregory Wallace, “Ken Feinberg to Lead GM Compensation,” CNN Money, April 1, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/01/news/companies/general-motors-kenneth-feinberg.
302
Ibid.
303
Matthew L. Wald and Bill Vlasic, “‘Upset’ G.M. Engineer Spoke in House Inquiry,” The New York Times, May 28, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/business/upset-gm-engineer-spoke-in-house-inquiry.html?_r=0.
304
Ibid.
305
Micheline Maynard, “Is GM CEO Mary Barra Being Thrown Under the Bus?” Forbes, April 2, 2014,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2014/04/02/is-gm-ceo-mary-barra-being-thrown-under-the-bus.
306
Chris Isidore and Katie Lobosco, “GM CEO Barra: ‘I am Deeply Sorry’,” CNN Money, April 1, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/01/news/companies/barra-congress-testimony.
307
Bill Vlasic and Hilary Stout, “G.M. Turns to Experienced Crisis Experts,” The New York Times, April 3, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/business/general-motors-turns-to-hired-crisis-managers.html.
85

for employees to report safety issues and concerns.
308
Later that month, the company
began replacing the ignition switches of 2.6 million vehicles at no charge, in addition to
providing free rental cars for their owners’ use in the interim.
309
On this Barra said,
“trying to locate several thousand switches in a population of 2.2 million vehicles and
distributed to thousands of retailers isn’t practical. Out of an abundance of caution, we
are recalling the rest of the model years.”
310

On June 5, at another global town hall meeting, Barra revealed the results of
Valukas’ report and divulged that she had fired 15 employees and disciplined five others
for misconduct related to the faulty ignition switches.
311
She called the report “extremely
thorough, brutally tough and deeply troubling.”
312
In July, GM announced it was
allocating $400 to $600 million to pay victims through its compensation program.
313
The
details of that plan were released on August 1 through a dedicated compensation website,
gmignitioncompensation.com. The program required those who accepted offers of
compensation to waive their right to sue GM. In early November, GM offered recalled-
car owners $25 gift cards valid at Amazon, AMC Theatres, Applebee’s, Bass Pro Shops,
Red Robin, Starbucks or Walmart and ran ads on Facebook, AOL, MSN and popular
gaming applications Candy Crush and Words with Friends in the hope of encouraging
ignition switch replacements.
314

308
General Motors, “GM Creates Speak Up for Safety Program for Employees.” GM News, April 10, 2014,
http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/Apr/0410-speakup.html.
309
General Motors, “GM Moves to Secure Recalled Ignition Switches,” General Motors Ignition Update, March 28, 2014,
http://www.gmignitionupdate.com/product/public/us/en/GMIgnitionUpdate/News.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/mar/032
8-ignition-service.html.
310
Ibid.
311
General Motors, “GM Receives Extremely ‘Thorough,’ ‘Brutally Tough’ and ‘Deeply Troubling’ Valukas Report,” GM News, June
5, 2014, http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/Jun/060514-ignition-report.html.
312
Ibid.
313
Tim Higgins, “GM Sets Aside at Least $400 Million to Pay Recall Victims,” July 24, 2014,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-24/gm-sets-aside-at-least-400-million-for-ignition-recall-victims.
314
Melvin Backman, “GM Offering $25 Gift Cards to People who Fix Recalled Cars,” CNN Money, November 5, 2014,
http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/04/autos/gm-recall-gift-cards; Greg Finn “General Motors Harnesses Facebook To Fuel Impressive
86

Consequences and Enduring Damage
Apart from the abovementioned fatalities and the damage to GM’s reputation,
which is difficult, if not impossible, to measure, the company faced many consequences
due to the ignition switch recall crisis. The recalls have been prohibitively expensive for
the US automaker. First, GM was fined a $28,000 civil penalty by the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration for failing to cooperate with the agency’s information
inquiry related to the recalls in a timely manner.
315
Nevertheless, this sum pales in
comparison to the record $35 million the company doled out in a settlement with the U.S.
Department of Transportation for its negligence in delaying the recall.
316
This is the
maximum penalty allowed under the law and mandated an admission from GM that the
company flouted federal regulations by ignoring the ignition switch problem when it first
came to light ten years prior.
317
In a statement on this historic fine, U.S. Transportation
Secretary Anthony Foxx called for legislation reform, saying “while we will continue to
aggressively monitor GM's efforts in this case, we also urge Congress to support our
GROW AMERICA Act, which would increase the penalties we could levy in cases like
this from $35 million to $300 million, sending an even stronger message that delays will
not be tolerated."
318

Still, the aforementioned fines were only the tip of the iceberg of GM’s recall-
related costs. In total, the recalls cost $4.1 billion in repairs, victim compensation and

Vehicle Recall Rate,” Marketing Land, December 29, 2014, http://marketingland.com/general-motors-harnesses-facebook-fuel-
impressive-vehicle-recall-rate-112637.

315
Alex Davies, “Feds Hit GM With $28,000 Fine For Not Answering Recall Questions,” Business Insider, April 8, 2014,
http://www.businessinsider.com/nhtsa-gm-recall-fine-2014-4.
316
U.S. Department of Transportation, “U.S. Department of Transportation Announces Record Fines, Unprecedented Oversight
Requirements in GM Investigation,” Transportation.gov, May 16, 2014, http://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-department-
transportation-announces-record-fines-unprecedented-oversight.
317
Ibid.
318
Ibid.
87

other expenses.
319
More specifically, the company shelled out $2.8 billion in estimated
repair fees, $400 million in compensation and an $874 million charge to cover the cost of
future recalls.
320
In the first two quarters of 2014, the costs associated with the recalls cut
deep into GM’s profits. In Q1, the company saw a incredibly modest earnings gain of
$125 million, a steep decline from the previous year’s net income of $865 million for the
same period.
321
The second quarter was disappointing, as GM’s net income fell to $200
million from $1.2 billion a year prior.
322
In the third and fourth quarters, however, the
company appeared to have completely recovered from the financial impact of the crisis.
GM earned 1.4 billion in Q3 and $1.1 billion in Q4, up from $700 and $900 million in
2013, respectively.
323

In addition to the financial implications of the crisis, the ignition switch defect
resulted in a host of legal troubles for GM. As the extent of GM’s negligence in the recall
crisis came to light, the company quickly became embroiled in multiple legal disputes,
many of which remain ongoing. “GM still faces a probe from the U.S. Justice
Department that could result in a hefty fine and awaits a decision from a federal
bankruptcy judge on whether it can retain a legal shield blocking claims from certain
customers seeking damages for lower resale values on their vehicles and injuries and
deaths tied to the defective switch.”
324
If the judge rules against the automaker, GM will

319
Chris Isidore, “GM’s Total Recall Cost: $4.1 Billion,” CNN Money, February 4, 2015,
http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/04/news/companies/gm-earnings-recall-costs.
320
Ibid.

321
Chris Woodyard, “GM Ekes out Q1 Gain Despite Switch Recall,” USA Today, April 24, 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/24/gm-q1-earnings/8084901.
322
James R. Healey, “GM Net Tumbles to $200M on $1.2B Recall Charge,” USA Today, July 24, 2014,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/07/24/gm-earnings-quarterly-recall/13062107.
323
“General Motors Reports Third Quarter 2014 Net Income Of $1.4 Billion,” GM Authority, October 23, 2014,
http://gmauthority.com/blog/2014/10/general-motors-reports-third-quarter-2014-net-income-of-1-4-billion; James R. Healey, “GM Q4
Earns $1.1B, Full-Year $2.8B After Recall Cost,” USA Today, February 4, 2015,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/02/04/gm-earnings-fourth-quarter-2014/22828709.
324
Mike Spector and Jeff Bennett, “Family of GM Ignition-Switch Victim Settles for More Than $5 Million,” The Wall Street
Journal, March 16, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/family-of-gm-ignition-switch-victim-settles-for-more-than-5-million-
1426529612.
88

be deemed liable for the reduced value of and injuries caused by recalled GM vehicles
purchased before the company declared bankruptcy in 2009.
325
This will also leave GM
vulnerable to paying billions of dollars in potential lawsuits and legal fees.
326
As of
March 2015, 104 death and injury lawsuits have been filed on behalf of drivers of
recalled cars, in addition to 108 suits seeking class-action status for value lost on their
vehicles.
327

Despite GM’s good name and reputation getting dragged through the mud,
disconcerting legal woes, congressional scrutiny and raft of bad press calling the safety
and quality of its vehicles into question, “the giant automaker's core business appeared to
be largely unscathed by the recall crisis.”
328
In fact, the company has emerged from the
largest recall in automotive history with its strongest U.S. sales since 2007, market
analysts are predicting record global sales this year after reaching a record of 9.9 million
vehicles in 2014 and GM plans to raise its quarterly dividend to 36 cents, a 20 percent
increase.
329

Finally, GM’s stock has almost completely recovered from the dampening effects
of the crisis. The automaker’s shares started the 2014 calendar year trading at $40.87.
330

The stock price dropped 27% as a result of the recalls, reaching a low of $29.69 in
October, but has slowly climbed back up to $38.65 as of March 2015, only 5% below its

325
Greg Gardner, “GM Returns to Bankruptcy Court Seeking Legal Protection,” Detroit Free Press, February 13, 2015,
http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2015/02/13/gm-heading-back-bankruptcy-court/23394985.
326
Ibid.

327
Linda Sandler, “GM Counts 104 Death, Injury Suits Related to Car Defects,” Bloomberg, February 4, 2015,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-04/gm-counts-104-death-injury-lawsuits-related-to-car-defects.
328
Chris Woodyard, “GM Ekes out Q1 Gain Despite Switch Recall.”
329
General Motors, “GM Posts its Best November U.S. Sales Since 2007,” GM News, December 2, 2014,
http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/Dec/gmsales.html; Greg Gardner, “GM's 9.9
Million Global Sales were Slightly Below VW,” Detroit Free Press, January 14, 2015,
http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2015/01/14/gm-global-sales/21767991; Ben Klayman, “Exclusive:
Shareholders May Get More Cash Back Later in 2015 – GM CFO,” Reuters, February 4, 2015,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/04/us-gm-cash-exclusive-idUSKBN0L81BR20150204.
330
“General Motors Co.” Market Watch. http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/gm.
89

pre-crisis levels.
331
Thus, while GM continues to experience some lingering
consequences, the company seems to have weathered the storm rather quickly and
effortlessly, which is quite remarkable given the many lives lost and the extent of the
damage generated by the ignition switch recalls.

331
Ibid.

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Chapter VII: Content Analysis Findings
Predominant Frames in GM’s Crisis Communications (RQ1)
The findings of the content analysis demonstrated that GM and the media differed
in terms of how they characterized or framed the ignition switch recalls. GM, for its part,
most frequently referred to the recalls as an “issue” or “problem.” More precisely, the
company used the issue and problem frames in its crisis communications 52 and 29
percent of the time, respectively. By contrast, GM used the “situation,” “accident,”
“event” and “tragedy” frames rather sporadically, and only twice referred to the ignition
switch recalls as a crisis. The breakdown of GM’s usage of these latter frames is as
follows: situation 7%, accident 6%, event 2%, tragedy 2% and crisis 2%.

Figure 3: Frequency Distribution of GM Frames.
The two instances where the word crisis was employed occurred in a single press
release that documented the transcript of a GM global town hall meeting led by CEO
0

10

20

30

40

50

60

91

Mary Barra.
332
In reporting the findings of the Valukas report to GM’s employees, Barra
twice referred to the recalls as a crisis. In the first case, she said, “as I lead GM through
this crisis, I want everyone to know that I am guided by two clear principles: First, that
we do the right thing for those who were harmed; and, second, that we accept
responsibility for our mistakes.”
333
In the second example, Barra added, “This is not just
another business crisis for GM. We aren't simply going to fix this and move on. We are
going to fix the failures in our system.”
334
Thus, it appears as though GM’s crisis
management advisors intentionally omitted the term crisis from the company’s
communications, to avoid further inflaming the situation.
Predominant Frames in Media Coverage of GM Recall Crisis (RQ1)
As mentioned above, compared with GM, the media interpreted the ignition
switch recalls in a somewhat different manner. Similar to GM, “issue” and “problem”
were two of the frames among those employed most extensively, at 20 and 35 percent
respectively. Unlike the automaker, however, the media overwhelmingly agreed that the
ignition switch recalls could be aptly deemed a crisis. To that end, “crisis” was the
second most common frame used by the media at 21 percent. Moreover, the media
employed the “accident” frame 13% of the time, “situation” 4%, “scandal” 2%,
“incident” 2%, “event” 1,” tragedy” 0.5%, disaster, 0.5%, and emergency 0.2%.

332
General Motors, “GM CEO Mary Barra’s Remarks to Employees on Valukas Report Findings,” GM News, June 5, 2014,
http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2014/Jun/060514-mary-remarks.html.
333
Ibid.
334
Ibid.

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Figure 4: Frequency Distribution of Media Frames.
Crisis Management Strategies Employed by GM (RQ2)
GM’s crisis management team employed multiple response strategies to regain
legitimacy, repair the company’s reputation and minimize the adverse effects of the
crisis. The company most commonly pursued Benoit’s corrective action stance in both of
the ways outlined earlier in this volume. First, GM conveyed its efforts to repair the
damage caused by recalls, such as rectifying the ignition switch defect in a redesign and
replacing the faulty parts of the vehicles. Moreover, the company communicated the
measures it had implemented to ensure that a similar situation would not occur in the
future. Several of the tactics executed in this regard include the creation of the Speak Up
for Safety program and suspending or firing the GM employees deemed at fault for the
crisis. Corrective action comprised 22% of the repair strategies utilized by GM.
The second category of strategies that appeared most frequently in GM’s crisis
communications related to the ignition switch recalls was instructing information (20%).
0

50

100

150

93

The company regularly provided practical information to its stakeholders; for example,
GM issued letters advising recalled car owners to remove all items from their key rings
and urged them to repair their vehicles. The third tactic GM used most was providing
assurances; for example, the company repeatedly maintained that its vehicles were safe to
drive and that the situation was under control. Of all the response strategies employed by
GM, assurance was used 16% of the time. The company also expressed concern in its
crisis communication materials. More specifically, 12% of the GM’s response tactics
were messages of sympathy for those who were injured or killed due to the ignition
switch defect and their families.
Eight percent of GM’s crisis communication efforts were on the subject of
compensation. The company attempted to make amends for its wrongdoing through
restitution, first by offering cash allowances toward the purchase or lease of a new
vehicle and reimbursement for previous ignition switch repairs, and later by establishing
a distinct compensation program. Justification or attempts to minimize the offensiveness
and perceived severity of the crisis accounted for 7% of GM’s repair strategies, as the
company initially alleged that no fatalities or injuries occurred as a result of the ignition
switch defect. Five percent of the company’s response strategies involved reminding
stakeholders of GM’s past record of good behavior and customer safety, whereas the
company expressed regret for the crisis in 4% of its crisis communications.
Ingratiation comprised 4% of the repair strategies employed by GM. To that end,
the company praised its stakeholders, specifically GM car dealers, for their performance
in handling the recalls and subsequent repairs. Apologies factored into 3% of GM’s repair
messages. Only one attempt was made to scapegoat (1%). In this case, GM’s early
94

statements about the vehicle accidents related to the recalls highlighted alcohol and a
failure to wear seat belts as contributing factors, thus laying blame on the drivers. Finally,
it is worth noting that at no point did GM attempt to advance a denial posture or claim to
be a victim of circumstance, most likely due to unambiguous veracity of evidence. A
categorical denial of the crisis, or an assertion that it occurred due to the actions of some
external actor, would have been too implausible for any level of acceptance by the
company’s stakeholders.

Figure 5: Frequency Distribution of GM Repair Strategies.

Repair
Strategies

0

20

40

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Chapter VIII: Key Lessons from Interview

The word crisis is pejorative and incendiary
The interview with Mr. Bunting can be reduced to a single overarching argument:
that the use of the word “crisis” within the PR profession and among practitioners is not
only useless and unnecessary, but also downright harmful and counterproductive. This
idea first came to light upon the interviewer’s realization that the word crisis rarely
appears, if at all, on the G.F.BUNTING+CO website, despite the fact that the company is
a crisis firm in practice if not in name. When probed why this was the case, Bunting
conceded that it was very much a conscious omission, as well as a promotional strategy
for the firm, calling it “a psychological ploy.” He explained, “calling it a crisis and hiring
a crisis manager kind of puts it out front and makes it a much bigger crisis than it really
is…If you don’t call it a crisis and you’re dealing with something that is a PR matter, I
just think the clients feel better about it.”
Several implications for PR practitioners and crisis managers may be drawn from
this proposition. First, it suggests that the word crisis itself has intensifying properties and
magnifying potential. In other words, by calling a particular situation or issue a crisis, it
can become exacerbated and more difficult to manage, irrespective of the true facts of the
case. Thus, crisis, as a descriptor, can fan the flames of a situation to the extent that the
docile flicker of a candle erupts into an uncontrollable wildfire. Second, the use of the
word crisis to describe an event not only negatively impacts its progression and potential
for resolution, but also the people or entities experiencing it. In this context, avoiding use
of the word may have a mollifying effect on those who have been assigned blame for the
so-called crisis. Accordingly, they will feel better equipped and disposed to manage the
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situation, comforted by the belief that they are up against a less aggravating and
seemingly innocuous problem.
In addition, Mr. Bunting explained that the tendency among crisis management
firms to promote their practices by touting their crisis credentials, high-profile clients and
controversial cases only serves to supply the media with needless ammunition in the
future. Unfortunately, it is the firm’s clients that bear the brunt of this marketing strategy,
particularly in instances where they are not yet in crisis, but merely handling a delicate
situation as cautiously and proactively as possible before it becomes unmanageable. In
this context, everything is about appearance, as Bunting elaborated, “when clients come
to us – most of the time – it’s clear they’re in a crisis…What they don’t want to see, first
and foremost, is the headline firm XYZ or CEO hires crisis manager, because then that
tells the world they’re in a crisis.”
Thus, an association with the “c-word” signals to the media and, by extension, the
world, that the client was in such dire straits they required the managing muscle of a self-
proclaimed crisis expert. Moreover, this dynamic presents something of a catch-22,
especially for organizations or public figures facing situations of crisis proportions. More
specifically, although the crisis-afflicted individual or entity desires the most competent
and experienced advisers to handle and ultimately diffuse the problem, it is not in their
best interests to be grouped among the O.J. Simpsons and Michael Vicks of the world or,
as Bunting terms it, the “rogues gallery of clients.” In sum, PR practitioners must
recognize that when it comes to crisis management, discretion is of paramount
importance. They may be better positioned to serve their clients and resolve crises if they
avoid falling prey to the fatal error of crying crisis.
97

Bunting’s ruminations reiterate the tenets of the Thomas Theorem. That is, he
lends credence to the idea that situations defined as real become real in their
consequences. Or, in this case, a situation that is defined as a crisis can indeed become
one, simply as a result of its nominal categorization. In this regard, Bunting has given
significant consideration to the politics and power of labeling, making the conscious
decision to gingerly skirt around the “c-word” in his role as a crisis manager for strategic
purposes. From this position, one can infer that the use of the word crisis to characterize
organizational issues certainly affects the afflicted entity’s own interpretation and socially
constructed reality of the situation, which, in turn, impacts its corresponding response and
management efforts, as well as the relative ease or difficulty with which the situation is
resolved.

A crisis boils down to magnitude and immediacy
Earlier in this volume, the author analyzed the myriad and varied characteristics
scholars and practitioners use to diagnose situations or events as crises. To that end, there
is a broad consensus around three crisis identifiers, namely, surprise, threat, and short
response time. Bunting’s own views echo the latter two attributes. He believes that one
can distinguish crises from lesser aggravators in the presence of marks of magnitude and
immediacy. “Magnitude in that it’s a big deal; it’s a big problem… And then it’s the
immediacy: It’s a crisis if you have to act now.” He went on to explain this reasoning by
way of an analogy. When seeking to determine if a crisis is a crisis, Bunting applies a
yardstick of his own: the “Red Adair test.” Red Adair was an oil well firefighter and 20
th

98

century American hero, immortalized by John Wayne in the film Hellfighters.
335
The
ever-swashbuckling Adair was best known for successfully extinguishing more than
2,000 spectacular blazes that could not be tamed by other means, earning him a
reputation as a fire troubleshooter.
336

The fact that Bunting uses Red Adair as his crisis litmus test suggests that crises
cannot be resolved by routine procedures. Rather, they are wholly special circumstances
that require equally unique management practices, problems so large in magnitude they
require major-league problem solvers. This point extends the Red Adair comparison even
further, for Adair is noted for inventing new firefighting equipment and techniques when
existing methods fell short in meeting the demands of the job at hand.
337
In terms of
immediacy, time is not a luxury to be had when confronting raging wildfires. Likewise,
in the organizational context, if a situation or issue must be dealt with straightaway,
without so much as a minute to spare, then the problem is likely a crisis.
So while a given individual or entity may retain the services of a PR expert for
countless reasons, this contractual relationship alone is not sufficient evidence for the
existence of a crisis. Bunting is the first to admit that not everything is a crisis, saying, “if
somebody needs reputational management, in terms of proactively playing offense, to
recover from some event, that’s not a crisis. And if it’s something that they’re looking to
go on the offense and say attack an adversary, that’s not a crisis. And if its more garden
variety, kind of routine PR media matter, that’s not a crisis.”

335
Michael MacRae, “Red Adair to the Rescue,” The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, December 2012,
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/fossil-power/red-adair-to-the-rescue.
336
Ibid.
337
Ibid.

99

The potential for crisis has increased, as has the use – and overuse – of the word.
Bunting maintains that the seeming ubiquity of crisis is the result of a
dichotomous phenomenon. On the one hand, he believes the word crisis is applied too
liberally to any situation or matter that could be considered controversial, even in
instances where no crisis has occurred. This tendency is exacerbated by the speed with
which news is delivered in the Information Age, as rumors of alleged crises, albeit
sometimes unfounded, quickly traverse the globe and become accepted as fact. While
these behaviors ultimately dilute the descriptive power and gravitas of the word itself,
and can be distressing for organizations that see their minor issues blown entirely out of
proportion, all is not lost. In fact, Bunting considers this a boon for the PR industry,
arguing, “it’s good for the crisis PR industry that people refer to things almost
ubiquitously as a crisis, because if it’s a crisis then you need somebody to help bail you
out.”
Nevertheless, this is hardly a welcome development for the wrongfully accused.
Mr. Bunting divulged a story about a client he had worked with years prior who was
confronted with allegations of sexual harassment. Although neither the accuser nor the
representative who lodged the complaint on their behalf had alleged the commission of a
sexual act, and an investigation revealed no misconduct on the part of the accused, the
media, then and now, continues to refer to it as a sex scandal. This ought to come as no
surprise, of course, that the media would inflate the facts of a situation to attract attention
and pique the interest of the public. Still, it is an unjust outcome for the individual or
organization that finds its reputation tarnished by overzealous crisis-mongers.
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The second explanation Bunting offers for why crisis appears so pervasive today
is a product of the Internet and the way in which news is circulated. He mentioned an
investigative news story he penned years ago as a journalist for the LA Times, long
before the advent of social media, about a major, verified crisis within a well-known
religious organization. He explained that although it was a big story for a short while in
the immediate circulation area where the crisis had occurred, the news remained
contained to the region and eventually petered out on its own. Bunting uses the Donald
Sterling case as another example of the way the media landscape has changed, proposing
that pre-social media and the 24-hour news cycle, Sterling’s racially insensitive remark
would have likely blown over rather quickly and be seen as a mistake rather than the
career-ending and reputation-annihilating PR nightmare it proved to be. Thus, the current
media environment is a very unforgiving place in which to operate, where routine
problems are unceremoniously hyperbolized into crises, as Bunting elaborates:
Today, your circulation area is the globe…As a result, I think that’s been the game
changer and that’s why everything that is done within kind of the environment we’re
talking about is magnified, and magnified times really an unknown number. Because
so many of us get our news electronically, instantaneously, and if there’s a scandal of
some sort involving a company, an individual, a CEO, a celebrity, before, chances
are, you read about it in the morning paper and a lot of people didn’t read the morning
paper and it just didn’t happen overnight. And now, add Twitter to that and all the
other things that we do in terms of social media…it’s a boomerang that really cannot
be controlled…and if you have a situation where TMZ and the TMZs of the world are
now the drivers of mainstream news…all of a sudden it just boomerangs. It doesn’t
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just boomerang in LA or in California or in the United States, but it boomerangs
globally. The propulsion of crises, and how crises kind of rise to the immediate top of
the media agenda is directly the result of the explosion of social media and social
media outlets.
Thus, it is not only the subject matter of news, but also its mode of delivery, that
contributes to the perception that crisis is woven into the fabric of everyday life. It is no
longer the case that stories of organizational upheaval can remain behind closed doors or
be confined to one particular area of the world. Instead, the realities of the way
information is circulated today allow for the unfettered importation of crisis news stories
throughout the globe. “The improved speed of communication increases the vulnerability
of an organization to a crisis situation, and the modern media are able to bridge the
distance between the crisis epicenter and millions of people all over the world.”
Finally, Bunting explains that the labeling of certain situations as crises sets a
dangerous precedent for future events of a similar nature to be characterized in an
identical manner. In support of this point he again relies on the Donald Sterling scandal,
making the case that the Atlanta Hawks email controversy would never have reached
crisis proportions were it not for the Sterling case paving the way just a few months prior.
Therefore, the word crisis takes on the wide-ranging connotations and various meanings
of its near infinite applications or, as Bunting so eloquently put it, “crisis begets crisis.”

Crisis plans have real practical value, but are not always feasible.
Bunting explains that, in his experience, 90% of clients only seek crisis management
assistance once a crisis has already arisen or is imminent. “It is the rare client who comes
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to us in advance and says, ‘we would like to engage you because we understand the way
the media works, we understand the way whistleblowers work, we understand the way
disgruntled employees and extortion works and we know that we’re one episode away
from a crisis. Please help us develop, draft, construct and finalize a crisis plan’.” In the
cases where advanced planning is possible, Bunting’s firm crafts crisis plans that are the
product of extensive and exhaustive efforts, where everyone in the organization knows
their role, who the spokesman, strategists and decision-makers are and how they ought to
respond. Still, the directives and prescriptions of such plans are hardly ironclad, but
instead leave room for the organization’s leadership to “call audibles” depending on the
facts and circumstances of the particular situation.
Bunting sees the way crisis plans are generally approached and incorporated within
the overall practice of crisis PR as a major weakness of the profession. Specifically, he
highlights the fact that most crisis plans end up on a shelf gathering dust, especially in
instances where organizational stakeholders are not invested in their development and
upkeep. For crisis plans to be operable and serve their purpose, they must be regularly
maintained and implemented if and when a crisis occurs.

Every crisis is a different beast; there is no panacea for crisis management.
“Every crisis is different. One of the reasons why we are not quick to give solutions
before we get all the facts, before we make a site visit, before we interview the client and
before we get all of our questions answered is that…the nature of crises is there’s not a
one formula, one solution, one fix-all for crises.” Generally speaking, however, Bunting
does adhere to a somewhat standardized process for managing crises. First, he says, the
103

crisis must be resolved as quickly as possible. Circling back to the abovementioned Red
Adair analogy, Bunting compares this first step to capping a gushing oil well or
extinguishing a fire. In other words, every effort should be made on the part of the
organization to avoid extending the crisis and to help bring the actual event itself to a
conclusion. To that end, Bunting typically advises against holding press conferences, but
for those organizations intent on speaking to their stakeholders and the media in person,
any more than one is too many.
The second step in Bunting’s crisis protocol is containing or minimizing the damage,
both physical and reputational. The essential ingredient of this stage is transparency, as
he explained, “we’re great storytellers. We’re here to help you tell your story. We need to
know what your story is, but we also need to know the whole story.” Clients frequently
fail to disclose material information to their PR advisors or legal counsel, whether
intentionally or inadvertently. This becomes particularly problematic for those tasked
with making critical crisis management decisions, for they cannot adequately prepare
with imperfect information and therefore run the risk of being blindsided with damning
accusations and questions from the media and key stakeholders without the luxury of
foresight.
Bunting takes umbrage with treating all crises as if they are the same, a practice he
considers endemic to the larger PR firms. Many of these firms rely on a one-size-fits-all
approach to crisis, he says, with something of a checklist of tired and unimaginative
management techniques. To Bunting, this is a far cry from the gold standard of crisis
management. “Those that are really good assess every situation, analyze it, come up with
solutions that are both strategic and creative and, most importantly, fit the specific
104

circumstances of the crisis to begin with.” He highlights several other common and
critical crisis management errors. Chief among them are not being transparent, shifting
blame, allowing external actors to define the situation or control the narrative and staying
dormant.

The media are the arbiters of crisis.
Bunting believes that the nature of the media’s treatment of a sensitive situation
or event sets the tone for what follows and, in particular, influences how it is perceived
and interpreted by the larger public. Consequently, when the media reaches a broad
consensus characterizing a given issue as a crisis, this mandates some level of response
from the implicated organization. As he clarified, “if the media’s writing about a crisis,
and they’re calling it a crisis, then you have to pay attention…if it’s being labeled a crisis
then there’s something you need to do about it.” Nevertheless, Bunting cautions against
overreacting to these types of allegations given the media’s penchant for sensationalism
and tendency to proclaim crisis at the earliest sign of organizational disruption. Those
organizations that find themselves embroiled in a crisis of the media’s making run the
risk of further inflaming the situation by treating it as if it were a crisis when, in fact, it is
not. Thus, taking too aggressive a stance does nothing but contribute to the crisis, giving
it a longer shelf life, more publicity and attention, and ultimately causing it to become a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
Once again, Bunting’s words and ideas are imbued with vestiges of the Thomas
Theorem. More specifically, he unwittingly demonstrates how the Thomas Theorem
operates on two levels, the internal and external. In terms of the former, when
105

organizations define the troublesome situations in which they find themselves as crises,
they will resort to drastic, unnecessary measures that exacerbate the issue by confirming
crisis, ultimately inviting needless attention and scrutiny. Thus, in defining a potentially
non-existent crisis as real and addressing it accordingly, a crisis subsequently
materializes. Conversely, with reference to the latter, insofar as Bunting recognizes the
ability of the media to contrive crises merely by virtue of labeling them as such, he
affirms the validity of the Thomas Theorem. The social, political and ethical effects that
flow from the media’s definitions of crisis testify to the manner in which these social
constructions become real in their consequences.

106

Chapter IX: Conclusion
In summary, the incidence of crisis has indeed increased, both in frequency and
intensity, as has the tendency to proclaim crisis at the first sign of organizational
disruption. This trend is especially pronounced among the mass media, though the public
is also guilty of overusing the word. The rising prevalence of crisis is the result of the
increasing value of corporate reputations, reduced tolerance for organizational
misconduct, a decidedly interconnected world and, perhaps most importantly, the rapid
pace of information transmission and high visibility of corporate behavior afforded and
enabled by social media.

The following lessons have been gleaned and synthesized from this volume:
• Crises are inevitable. Hence, proactive and iterative crisis management processes
are a prerequisite for every organization operating today.
• A crisis is not a problem or delicate situation. It is something much larger,
unwieldy and more sinister, and should be approached as such. Crises require
immediate action and unconventional methods for resolution.
• Situations defined as crises, particularly by media, can – and often do – become
crises in their consequences. Accordingly, organizations must pay attention to
how issues are labeled, both internally and externally, as this will set the course
for their management and potential resolution.
• The perceptual dimension of crisis is exceedingly important, albeit perilously
overlooked by scholars. In a sense, crises are in the eyes of the beholders; they are
107

socially constructed. Thus, when speaking of crisis, there is no such thing as an
objective reality.
• The far-flung and wholly dissimilar contexts in which the crisis label is invoked
testifies to the weakening utility and increasing genericism of crisis as an
analytical concept. A terrorist attack and a careless social media faux pas should
not yield the same descriptor.
• The media is much more likely than organizations or the public to label
troublesome situations as crises. Organizations, for their part, frequently tiptoe
around the “C-word,” favoring less inflammatory terms like “situation,” “issue,”
and “problem” to categorize organizational upheaval.
• Taking swift and drastic action to rectify a crisis and making these efforts known
to public through consistent and transparent communication facilitates and
expedites the resolution of a crisis. This explains how GM recovered rather
quickly from the largest and most deadly recall in automotive history.
• The tendency of public relations practitioners to heavily advertise their crisis
expertise may do more harm than good for their clients embroiled in crises.
Discretion is highly-valued virtue.
• Every crisis is different. There is no universal crisis remedy.

Taken together, these findings go a long way toward filling a knowledge gap in the
existing repertoire of crisis literature. Moreover, they allow for a more profound and
comprehensive understanding of organizational crises as they are experienced today.

108

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Appendix A: Interview Transcript

AK: The first thing I want to talk about is something you mentioned in your lecture:
that the word crisis rarely appears, if at all, on your website. Why is that?
GB: Because most clients and most people who are in crises, whether they’re CEO or a
small company or a celebrity or an athlete, they know deep down inside that they’re
dealing with a crisis. But calling it a crisis and hiring a crisis manager kind of puts it out
front and makes it a much bigger crisis than it really is to them. And it’s as much a
psychological ploy as it is anything else. If you don’t call it a crisis and you’re dealing
with something that is a PR matter, I just think the clients feel better about it, number
one. Number two, the worst-case scenario is when somebody has a crisis, hires a crisis
manager, and then the first story they read is how they just hired a crisis manager because
the crisis is out of control and you know…we call it the rogues gallery of clients, and
then you have a crisis firm that it says: “well they just hired crisis firm XYZ, and crisis
firm XYZ represents, you know, OJ Simpson, and Michael Jackson, and all these other
people that they don’t want to be associated with.

AK: So, you want to distance your firm from the idea of crisis itself?
GB: Well, we don’t want to distance ourselves from it but the reality is with clients…you
know, lookit (sic), everything is about appearance right? And it’s almost like calling
yourself a crisis manager begets crisis, begets clients embroiled in a crisis. And when
clients come to us, most of the time, it’s clear they’re in a crisis, that’s the reason why
they’re reaching out to us. What they don’t want to see, first and foremost, is the
headline, you know, firm XYZ or CEO hires crisis manager. Cause then that tells the
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world they’re in a crisis. That’s not kinda the first step you want to do out of the box, so
we’re very sensitive to that appearance. And we find our clients appreciate the fact that
they’re spared that, whereas if they hired another firm they wouldn’t be. If I plaster all
over my website that I’m a crisis manager, and if you Google PR crisis and my name
comes up, it’s very likely that if it’s a sensitive matter and a public matter, and
somebody’s hired and that’s what they see, that’s what they’re going to write. And that’s
not the first story you want out of the box with a new client. That’s not what the client
wants.

AK: What is a crisis to you? How do you know if something is a crisis or just a
routine problem? In other words, when is a crisis a crisis?
GB: Magnitude and immediacy. Magnitude in that it’s a big deal; it’s a big problem; it’s
something that whether it’s within someone’s industry, whether its something that, you
know, you and I would be interested in or remember if we read it, or whether its…crisis
is defined…(trails off). I got a new client last night, you know. You and I have never
heard of this client, you’ve never heard of his business, you’ve never heard of the thing
that’s the crisis. To you and me, it’s not a crisis. To them, it’s a real crisis, because within
their industry, which they want to dominate, there are blogs and trade publications
writing bad things about them, so the crisis is the magnitude for that client. And then it’s
the immediacy: It’s a crisis if you have to act now. I kind of use the Red Adair analogy.
Have you ever heard of Red Adair?

AK: No.
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GB: Red Adair is…Google him, he’s a fascinating guy…he’s the firefighter of all
firefighters. When there is an oil slick that’s on fire, when there is just a fire that normal
folks can’t take care of, you call Red Adair, and he comes in and puts out the fire. So if
there’s a need to put out the fire, that’s a crisis. If somebody needs reputational
management, in terms of proactively playing offense, to recover from some event, that’s
not a crisis. And if it’s something that they’re looking to go on the offense and say attack
an adversary, that’s not a crisis. And if its more garden variety, kind of routine PR media
matter, that’s not a crisis. I look at kind of…you know, I call it the Red Adair test.
Immediacy and magnitude. And if both of those hit for a particular client, they’re in a
crisis.

AK: It seems like any time a company slips up these days the media runs out calling
it a crisis. Has the propensity for crisis increased? Are people overly cautious? Or is
there just a tendency to overuse the word crisis?
GB: I think it’s little bit of all of the above. I think a lot of it has to do with what we
talked about in class, the speed with which news is delivered and I think that people are
quick to call almost anything that is controversial a crisis. And even at times when it’s
not a crisis. You would argue it’s good for the crisis PR industry that people refer to
things almost ubiquitously as a crisis, because if it’s a crisis then you need somebody to
help bail you out of the crisis. But I see lot of, you know, the analogy I would use is, the
word scandal and sex scandal gets thrown around a lot. And we had a client who, you
know, in the not recent past, had a situation where there was a Gloria Allred sexual
harassment complaint. An investigation was done, where it was a found that no company
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policies were violated and there was no sexual harassment. Gloria Allred never alleged
sex, the woman who made the claim never alleged sex, and the CEO client was adamant
that he never had sex. Yet the media, then and now, continues to refer to it as a sex
scandal. And we chuckle, but it’s not very funny, it’s a sex scandal with no sex. But the
media was quick to call it that and bloggers still call it that and its, you know the sex
scandal. I think crisis has become very similar to that. People are quick to use crisis…you
know…a lot of this, I think, comes out of…you know what’s fascinating? I don’t know if
anyone’s ever told you this. And I don’t watch the show, but the show Scandal, are you
familiar with that?

AK: Ya.
GB: You know, that’s a crisis PR firm right? It’s based on a crisis PR firm in D.C. And
it’s almost made it something that has become much more popularized within the masses,
because I am surprised, I guess I stopped being surprised, the number of times people
say, “Oh, like Olivia Pope, right?”, “Oh, like the show Scandal.” And I think people feel
like because of the hollywoodization of crisis…another one is Ray Donovan. The
ShowTime series?

AK: Ya, sure.
GB: I’ve had people jokingly, in a good record way, say, “Oh, this is my Ray Donovan.”
I’m quick to say that we don’t carry guns and we don’t shoot people but it’s actually how
I first learned of the show and started watching it. I actually really enjoy the show. So,
you’re seeing increasingly that the people who practice crisis are becoming subjects of,
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you know, kind of Hollywood treatment. I think that just makes crisis even more
ubiquitous than it was and combine that with the internet and the lightening speed in
which news breaks and I think that’s the reason why it’s much more commonplace today
than it was, say, even five years ago.

AK: But doesn’t that dilute the power of the word itself?
GB: Well, we obviously don’t feel the need to use it, so we would say it doesn’t really
have any power. In other words, we don’t feel compelled, as other firms do, to say we’re
a crisis PR firm. And as I explained in class, it’s two reasons for that. One, we’re not a
crisis PR firm. One of the things that I deliberately wanted to do when I started out the
firm was diversity our practice. And part of the business model of saying we want clients
for life is we don’t want when the crisis is over for the client to say “Okay, don’t need
you anymore.” And that’s part of it. But the second part is we don’t feel the need
to…because if the term had power and cachet and was important, we’d call ourselves a
crisis PR firm. We don’t believe its…we don’t feel the need to validate ourselves by
calling ourselves a crisis PR firm.

AK: How is the media, or, today, social media, complicit in cultivating or, in most
cases, magnifying crisis?
GB: Well, I think that…you know, the comparison I make was when I was an
investigative reporter at the LA Times, and I did a huge story on, let’s use as an example
the story on Cardinal Mahoney and when we did the story about pedophile priests and we
did it on the front page of the Sunday LA Times and it was two full pages inside and it
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was just an ass-kicking investigative story. Back then, when there was no social media
and there was no Twitter and there was no Facebook and we didn’t get all of our news on
our iPhones, you know, that ran in Los Angeles and maybe got on the Times Tribune
wire, and unless you were looking for it, somebody in Washington D.C. or somebody in
Warsaw didn’t see it. And it was a big story and a big hit within the LA Times circulation
area. Well today, you know, your circulation area is the globe and everyone looks at news
based on what they see on our personal cell phone device. As a result, I think that’s been
the game changer and that’s why everything that is done within kind of the environment
we’re talking about is magnified, and magnified times, you know, really an unknown
number. Because so many of us get our news electronically, instantaneously, and if
there’s a scandal of some sort involving a company, an individual, a CEO, a celebrity,
you know, before, chances are, you read about it in the morning paper and a lot of people
didn’t read the morning paper and it just didn’t happen overnight. And now, add Twitter
to that and all the other things that we do in terms of social media. I just think it is a
boomerang that really cannot be controlled and I think it just magnifies…you know, we
were saying the other day when we were talking, post-Donald Sterling, now, a racially-
insensitive remark that would just pass and be seen as an innocent mistake or a not-so-
innocent mistake, would come and go and not be a big deal. I don’t know if you’re
familiar how much about sports but the Atlanta Hawks situation’s a bad thing because
what took place there would have been a local Atlanta story and, you know, the general
manager’s on leave, the owner has been forced to sell his team because of a dispute
where some things got leaked to the media. It was complete chaos, hyperbolic, and turned
into the crisis for the team. Pre-Donald Sterling, I don’t know if that would have been the
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case. It would have been a news story in Atlanta, it would have come and gone, it
wouldn’t have had the repercussions. And again, I mean, we talked about how the
Sterling case started with TMZ, and if you have a situation where TMZ and the TMZs of
the world are now the drivers of mainstream news, you know, most people that read TMZ
are getting it, well they’re all getting it on their personal devices, but they’re also getting
it instantaneously and it can be passed on through social media as it is, and all of a
sudden it just boomerangs. It doesn’t just boomerang in LA or in California or in the
United States, but it boomerangs globally. And I think that the propulsion of crises, and
how crises kind of rises to the immediate top of the media agenda is directly the result of
the explosion of social media and social media outlets.

AK: When you say that it wouldn’t have happened before the Donald Sterling
incident, is that what you meant when you said before that crisis begets crisis?
GB: Ya, exactly. I mean, I guess it’s two ways: one it’s because it’s the TMZs who own
that story and so social media plays that role, but ya, if a crisis happened in one area, one
industry, and then there’s anything remotely similar to that, the crisis begets crisis, and
what would arguably, normally, be an Atlanta business/sports story that would involve
the Atlanta Hawks, which nobody…you know, I defy anybody to name two players on
the Atlanta Hawks, because nobody really knows much about the Atlanta Hawks, but all
of a sudden they become…you know, that becomes a crisis and that becomes a big story,
because they’re in this crisis environment and social media, as I said, is almost like a
propulsion.

124

AK: How, if at all, are crisis plans used in practice?
GB: Well, we don’t do a lot of crisis plans because most clients don’t contact us until the
crisis hits. So, easily ninety-plus percent of the clients who come to us, they come to us
when there’s a crisis. It is the rare client who comes to us in advance and says, “We
would like to engage you because we understand the way the media works, we
understand the way whistleblowers work, we understand the way disgruntled employees
and extortion works and we know that we’re one episode away from a crisis. Please help
us develop, draft, construct and finalize a crisis plan.” When we do crisis plans, they’re
meant to be…not to store on a shelf, and we kind of pride ourselves that by the time we
get done with a crisis plan, and it is an extensive and exhaustive effort, everyone in the
organization knows what their role is, they know who the spokesman is, they know who
the strategists are, they know who the decision-makers are, they know how they’re going
to respond, they know who’s going to respond, and you obviously tweak and adjust and
call audibles along the way depending on the facts and circumstances, but, you know,
you’re right, we see that as a weakness in the overall practice of crisis PR in that most
plans sit on a shelf, gather dust, stakeholders are not invested in it and they don’t even
know its there, and a year after it’s done it’s, you know, “Oh, we have a crisis plan?”
Another thing is we put a lot of effort in our crisis plans, and we go in and we go through
the organization and we go through the tax records and we…um, we recently did one for
a large non-profit that deals in billions of dollars…well, maybe hundreds of millions of
dollars may be more accurate…and they were very smart and just said, “You know what?
We don’t want to get caught up in a crisis or a controversy unnecessarily and if we do we
want to know how we’re going to deal with it. Because right now we’re not prepared for
125

it.” And we kind of pride ourselves, frankly, in preparing crisis PR plans that actually
work and are actually operable and are actually going to be used and implemented if and
when a crisis occurs.

AK: Is there such thing as too much crisis preparedness?
GB: Not really. And the reason why is because what we see in the real world is people
don’t think about crises until the crisis has happened and it has unfolded. And instead
of…let’s come back to my Red Adair analogy…instead of having firefighting equipment
or having a fire extinguisher or having a drill about what happens in the case of a fire,
you know, the clients calls us when the house in on fire. And so I would say that…I
would be hard pressed to make the argument that there’s too much emphasis or too much
attention or too much planning goes into crises when, based on what I see, it is the rare,
astute client who comes to us in advance and says “I want to be prepared.”

AK: What is your number one priority in crisis management?
GB: You know, it’s a good question because I don’t have a quick answer. I think too
many PR firms, particularly the large PR firms, would answer that question with it’s X,
it’s Y or it’s Z. We look at it as every crisis is different, and one of the reasons why we
are not quick to give solutions before we get all the facts, and before we make a site visit,
and before we interview the client, and before we get all of our questions answered is
that…the nature of crises is there’s not a one formula, one solution, one fix-all for crisis.
Generically speaking, what you want to do is resolve the crisis – step one, put it in your
rear-view mirror behind you, don’t do anything to extend the crisis. Example: Tiger
126

Woods held something like three press conferences in the first ten days after the
Thanksgiving day episode in Florida. You know, we say if you’re going to hold a press
conference, and we generally don’t recommend press conferences for lots of reasons,
anything more than one is one too many. And if you’re holding a second one or a third
one while the crisis is developing, then you obviously failed the first time and the second
time. So cap the crisis as if you’re capping an oil well that’s gushing, extinguish the fire
and then quickly shift to reputation management. So contain the damage, minimize the
damage, do whatever you can, and part of that, we always tell the clients, is being
transparent. We’re great storytellers. We’re here to help you tell your story. We need to
know what your story is. We also need to know the whole story. Too often you have
clients who don’t tell professionals, whether it’s their lawyers or their PR counsel, “Okay,
here’s everything you should know.” And you’re making critical decisions based on what
you know, not on what you don’t know. And I can’t tell you the number of times we
heard something and we go back to the client and say, “What the hell, we didn’t know
about this.” “I didn’t think you needed to know about that,” or “I was too embarrassed to
say something,” or “I didn’t think it was important.” And you’re like, really? So, I’m
kind of rambling here but I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution but it’s: contain
the crisis, tell your story, and then get on to reputation management and do what you
need to do to rehabilitate the company, the individual, the CEO’s reputation, so you can
get on to, you know, back to business.

127

AK: Do you think there is a tendency, obviously not within your firm, but to treat
crises like they’re all the same and to have a one size fits all method of handling
them?
GB: In my firm?

AK: Not within your firm, but in the industry.
GB: Oh. I think that large PR firms in particular, based on my experience and those
clients that come to us, do have a one size fits all…they’ve got a manual, they pull it out,
“let’s do these things, let’s issue a press release, let’s have a press conference, let’s do X,
Y and Z.” And I think that those are the people that don’t adapt and frankly don’t do a
very good job. I don’t want to suggest that every large PR firm’s like that, but we see a
number of larger PR firms that tend to have a checklist and you kind of see the same
treatment. I think those that are really good assess every situation, analyze it, come up
with solutions that are both strategic and creative and most importantly fit the specific
circumstances of the crisis to begin with.

AK: Can a perceived crisis, so maybe it’s not really a crisis; it’s more of a
reputation problem or a delicate or special situation. But if it’s perceived as a crisis,
can it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
GB: There are clients who believe that they’re in a crisis and to the outside world and to
those of us who parachute in, get all the facts and assess it, have to talk the client off the
ledge and say, “This is a crisis in your world and your mind, but it’s really not. And so,
let’s be careful not to further inflame the situation by treating it like it is a crisis, because
128

it’s not.” And ya, there is some criticism there, or there’s an issue there, or there’s a
lawsuit there, but sometimes by overreacting and being too aggressive in defending a
client who thinks they’re in a crisis it does nothing but contribute to the crisis. And we
find ourselves, on occasion, cautioning clients not to overreact, because overreacting just
gives the circumstances around the crisis a longer shelf life and gives them more attention
and more publicity. And that’s the last thing you want to do.

AK: Who has the power to label something a crisis?
GB: I think in the end, the media and how they handle a big story goes a long way
toward defining a crisis. I think…or somebody who is a captain of industry in business, if
it’s affecting the bottom line or the reputation of the company or its products or its
reputation and that affects the stock price, it affects sales, it affects revenues, it affects
employee morale, those are all ways to measure whether one has a crisis or not. So I
don’t know that anybody quite frankly has the power to label it a crisis other than, I
guess, the media. If the media’s writing about a crisis, and they’re calling it a crisis, then
you have to pay attention and consider it, you know…if it’s being labeled a crisis then
there’s something you need to do about it.

AK: Last question: What are the most common mistakes made by organizations in
crisis?
GB: I’m thinking only because, you know, I’m going back to my “every crisis is
different.” Corporations and companies, firms that hire us…I mean, it’s hard for me to
say…I want to say that they overreact to the crisis because they’re living and breathing
129

and sleeping it, but, you know, I just told you that there are some cases where we say,
“You need to be more aggressive. You need to put your foot on the gas.” And there are
other times where we say, “you need to be less out, put your foot on the brake.” So, I
guess I want to give that some more thought, but we see companies shoot themselves in
the foot or make matters worse by doing things and those things include overreacting, not
being transparent, shifting blame, letting others define the problem or tell their story, in
other words being quiet or dormant, and those are several anecdotes that come into play
that we see.
130

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Asset Metadata

Creator Karp, Ashley (author)

Core Title The C word: managing crisis in the modern media landscape

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Strategic Public Relations

Publication Date 09/17/2015

Defense Date 09/17/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag case study,content analysis,corporate reputation,Crisis,crisis communication,crisis management,General Motors,OAI-PMH Harvest,Public Relations,reputation management,strategic planning

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Floto, Jennifer (committee chair), Miller, Eric C. (committee member), Tenderich, Burghardt (committee member)

Creator Email ashleyka@usc.edu,ashleykarp@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-184162

Unique identifier UC11276148

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Legacy Identifier etd-KarpAshley-3929.pdf

Dmrecord 184162

Document Type Thesis

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Rights Karp, Ashley

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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