Stormy weather: testing “stealing thunder” as a crisis communication strategy to improve communication flow between organizations and journalists
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PRSA Code of Ethics, Public Relations Society of America, NY, 2000, p. 11.
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Ibid., Among 39 cases of organizations facing sexual harassment suits, the legal strategy was used two-thirds of the time.
L. Lyon, G.T. Cameron, Fess up or stonewall? an experimental test of prior reputation and response style in the face of negative news coverage, Web Journal of Mass Communication Research 1 (4) (1998).
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For textbook case study examples of the Mitsubishi and Firestone product defect cases illustrating organizations attempting to bury information, see J. Frank, Sorry is no longer the hardest word, Marketing (October 2000), pp. 12–13
Conversely, the Tylenol product tampering incident is heralded as a benchmark example of how successful the full, rapid disclosure strategy can be. See L. Snyder, An anniversary review and critique: the Tylenol crisis, Public Relations Review 13 (4) (1983), pp. 19–28.
G.A. Donohue, P.J. Tichenor, C.N. Olien, A guard dog perspective on the role of media, Journal of Communication 42 (1995), pp. 115–132. Also, perhaps the most contemporary examples of “hits” include accusations of fiduciary scandal at Enron, Inc. and at WorldCom, Inc.
A. Gonzalez-Herrero, C.B. Pratt, op. cit., 1996
K.M. Hearit, op. cit., 1994
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For example—conflict (e.g., between the organization and key publics such as employees, interest groups, or customers), prominence (e.g., large organizations usually are considered newsworthy due to their size and influence), timeliness (e.g., crises may be sustained with additional news pegs, and in related and follow-up stories), and impact (e.g., large crises that affect many people demand coverage). Conflict is considered one of the most often used but least legitimate news values. See also T. Richards, B. King, An alternative to the fighting frame in news reporting, Canadian Journal of Communication 25 (2000), pp. 479–496.
H. Gans, op. cit., 1979, pp. 42–52
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Frames organize strips “cut from the stream of ongoing activity” of the everyday world and drive journalists to “come to closure quickly on the meaning of news—to determine what the story is about.” Framing involves “selecting and highlighting some features of reality while omitting others.” See R.M. Entman, Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm, Journal of Communication 43 (4) (1993), pp. 51–58, p. 53
Also see, R. Fowler, Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press, Routledge, NY, 1991
E. Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay in the Organization of Experience, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1974, pp. 10–11
T. Gitlin, op. cit., 1980
D. Graber, Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide, 2nd ed., Longman, NY, 1988
Graber, 1989, Content and meaning: What’s it all about?, American Behavioral Scientist, 33, 144, 10.1177/0002764289033002004
L. Dolnik, T.I. Case, K.D. Williams, Stealing Thunder as a Courtroom Tactic Revisited: Processes and Boundaries, 2002, Manuscript submitted for publication
Williams, 1993, The effects of stealing thunder in criminal and civil trials, Law and Human Behavior, 17, 597, 10.1007/BF01044684
Ibid., p. 597. Stealing thunder has been defined as “revealing negative information about oneself … before it is revealed or elicited by another person.”
Easley, 1995, Testing predictions derived from inoculation theory and the effectiveness of self-disclosure communications strategies, Journal of Business Research, 34, 93, 10.1016/0148-2963(94)00055-J
L. Arpan-Ralstin, D.R. Roskos-Ewoldsen, Stealing Thunder: An Analysis of the Effects of Organizational Self-disclosure During a Public Relations Crisis. Presented at the International Communication Association Annual Conference, Acapulco, Mexico, June 2000.
S.A. Ondrus, K.D. Williams, Effects of Stealing Thunder by a Political Candidate: Admit or Deny? Paper presented at Midwest Psychological Association annual conference, Chicago, 1996.
S.A. Ondrus, Scooping the Press: Reducing Newspaper Coverage of Political Scandal by Stealing Thunder, Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of Toledo, 1998.
Commodity theory, one theoretical explanation for the efficacy of stealing thunder, suggests that messages are just like commodities: the more of them there are, the less value they carry. See T.C. Brock, L.A. Brannon, Liberalization of commodity theory, Basic and Applied Social Psychology 13 (1992), pp. 135–144
S.A. Ondrus, op. cit., 1998.
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L. Arpan-Ralstin, D.R. Roskos-Ewoldsen, op. cit., 2000
L. Dolnick, K.D. Williams, Revealing the Worst First: When Does Stealing Thunder Reduce the Impact of Damaging Evidence? Unpublished manuscript, University of New South Wales, 2000.
K.D. Williams, et al., op. cit., 1993.
K.M. Hearit, op. cit., 1994.
L. Dolnick, T.I. Case, K.D. Williams, op. cit., 2000, Indeed, one study of stealing thunder found that when the opposing side disclosed to jurors that the defense’s self-disclosure of incriminating information was a long-standing practice designed to invoke sympathy for the defendant, the effect of stealing thunder was nullified.
According to Pincus and his colleagues, “[S]eparating these perceptions can uncover key data on how best to design strategies for bolstering public relations practitioners’ credibility and enhancing the value of the materials offered to the media.” See J.D. Pincus, T. Rimmer, R.E. Rayfield, F. Cropp, Newspaper editors’ perceptions of public relations: how business, news, and sports editors differ, Journal of Public Relations Research 5 (1) (1993), pp. 27–45, p. 44.
S.A. Ondrus, op. cit., 1998.
Ibid.
K.D. Williams et al., op. cit., 1993.
Two samples were drawn for the experiment. The first sample was a group of journalists, representing various media outlets throughout the U.S., participating in two seminars offered by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, FL. The second sample was a group of journalists and journalism students attending a regional conference of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).
Technical/relevant failures are those that occur within the product and technology activities of a firm and that occur within environments with which the organization shares a significant interdependency, such as customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators. See W.G. Egelhoff, F. Sen, An information-processing model of crisis communication, Management Communication Quarterly 5 (1992), pp. 443–484.
In both scenarios the factory’s operations director said that a pipe from a vat containing the chemical burst near a broken window, and that the chemical spurted out the window onto the sidewalk below. The sidewalk had been designed to drain rainwater into the river, a common practice for old sidewalks near the river. In both scenarios a representative of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) who was on site (at the river in the thunder condition/at the press conference in the stealing thunder condition) indicated that the chemical was toxic to humans and animals, who typically become mildly ill from inhaling its fumes and may become seriously ill from ingesting even small quantities through water, other liquids, or food. He speculated that the spill eventually would kill hundreds, or even thousands, of fish.
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The resulting words-by-words matrix of co-occurrences represents a compilation of the connection weights among the neurons, showing associations between all the words in a given text. The matrix then serves as a basis for further analysis, such as cluster analysis. The neural model works by creating a words-by-words matrix called a WIN, or weight-input-network matrix. Catpac treats each word as a neuron as it moves a scanning window through text. Each window represents a “case,” wherein neurons representing words are activated and then deactivated, decaying over time when the scanning window disappears. Neurons, or words, become positively interconnected in the network when they are simultaneously active in the window. Those that seldom or never co-occur become negatively interconnected. As the scanning window moves through the text, Catpac performs calculations not only for neurons/words that are active in the window, but also determines what other neurons are activated as a result of their connections to the active neurons. Catpac’s strength lies in the ability to use a computer to reveal complex patterns associated with word clusters based on frequency and content, and graphically depict these patterns. See J.K. Woelfel, Artificial neural networks in policy research: a current assessment, Journal of Communication 43 (1) (1993), pp. 63–80.
S.A. Ondrus, op. cit., 1998.
K.M. Hearit, op. cit., 1994.
L. Dolnick, K.D. Williams, op. cit., 2000, p. 5. Dolnick and Williams sum up the latter possibility succinctly: “By admitting the negative information, all doubts as to the veracity of the information should evaporate”
Ibid.
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L. Lyon, G.T. Cameron, op. cit., 1998.
Ibid.
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