Abstract
This edited volume starts out with an intriguing proposition that a calamitous event thousands of miles away in Asia had a profound effect on Nordic countries. The event was the Tsunami on Boxing Day (26 December) 2004 which many of us would have witnessed, and been shocked by, as a media event. With global 24-hour news coverage and the growth of the Internet, such events along with 9/11, and 7/7, can now reach in real time, and affect, people all over the world. The authors suggest that in part the 2004 Tsunami had a resonance because many of the countries affected such as Thailand, Sri Lanka and India were popular places for Scandinavians to get some winter sun. Indeed, the authors note that the 178 Finns who died made for the greatest death toll since the Second World War, and the 543 Swedes who lost their lives was the worst disaster since 1994. For these two countries a natural disaster half way across the world was a catastrophe.
The premise of this book is that although in its immediate aftermath the Tsunami led to huge media interest in Nordic countries, this is not the end of the story. Rather, this volume looks at what changes took place afterwards, particularly concerning public communication practices in Sweden and Finland. This fairly simple idea has made me think about crises with a fresh eye. In particular, because what may appear to be a crisis for someone, may also be a crisis for someone else where the link is not obvious. Moreover, the authors make us see that crises can be critical incidents which can have significant long-term effects beyond the immediate remit of a crisis.
Because of their political and media systems similarities, the 10 chapters of this book seek to compare and contrast the differences in how public communications responded to the crisis in Finland and Sweden. The individual chapters address for example the impact on the political process, crisis management and how the different media recorded the story.
Lars Nord and Jesper Strömbäck start by asking why the Swedish government was considered tardy in its crisis management. Without overtly stating so they assess this question in part from an agenda-setting perspective, and note that the Swedish media’s framing of the crisis was important. Their focus groups expected swift action from the Swedish government, including accurate information and assisting Swedish citizens evacuate from the affected areas. The data sample identified winners and losers in terms of how they handled the crisis, with the Swedish government being the main loser. The perceived poor handling of the crisis became a political problem of public reputation.
Jesper Falkheimer follows this by using rhetoric theory to assess how both the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the travel agency Fritidsresor handled their crisis communication. Falkheimer applies Benoit’s (1995) image repair theory to the crisis communication strategies used by his two examples by analysing press releases from the travel agency and the ministry press conference. While he recognizes comparative methodological issues with this approach, he argues that there were different communicative approaches taken by the two organizations. Moreover, the hypothesis is posited that these two approaches had a material effect on how the crisis developed.
Johanna Jääsaari seeks to assess why the ‘blame game’ in Finland was much shorter, and did not lead to the political crisis that afflicted Swedish politics. After an initially sluggish start the Finnish government used daily press conferences to create ‘media events’. In particular, Jaasaari notes that the government successfully framed their evacuation operation as a conquest over time. This compares strikingly with what Nord and Strömbäck describe in Sweden, where the media appear to be setting the agenda. This chapter clearly makes inferences around Kivikuru and Nord’s central point of the long-term impact of this crisis on the relationship between the media, politicians and the public.
The next chapter by Mervi Pantti takes a very different approach by looking at this crisis through the eyes of a much wider trend, namely how the media shape a wave of compassion and as such touch on other humanitarian crises. Conceptually compassion is viewed through the concept of the public sphere, though I am surprised that Habermas does not feature. Pantti argues that in Finland the public had compassion primarily because the media created a local resonance by focusing on the Finnish people affected, and the actions of the Finnish people and government in providing help.
The next chapter, by Letukas et al., tries to explain the role of the media in encouraging a disproportionate material assistance by two countries so far away from the actual disaster. The conceptual model applied is Durkheim’s social solidarity. This chapter unlike the others has also collected data from beyond Scandinavia and also in addition looks at the US media through content analysis. Letukas et al. suggest a model of the role the media played in social solidarity by both simplifying and personalizing the disaster. Essentially, like several others in this book, the authors point to the role of the media in framing the issues associated with the disaster.
Most of the previous chapters have focused on print media, but that by Maria Hellman and Kristina Riegert offers a welcome different perspective by looking at the impact of the news reporting through television. In particular they focus on one global channel, CNN, and one national channel, Swedish TV4. The data feel a bit more like an assessment of the different nature of the two channels’ approaches, than necessarily overly related to the circumstances of the crisis. But it does raise an interesting question concerning the role of journalists as ‘crisis managers’, in others words how journalists can become actors in the event.
Like Hellman and Riegert, Ullamaija Kivikuru tries to broaden the focus, and considers how magazines, with a different time frame, handled the Tsunami. However, they played safe and sought to echo what the news media said, and obviously some time after it was news. Kivikuri rightly suggests that a better alternative would have been for Finland’s magazines to ask serious investigative questions about what happened in response, why and what could be done better. In essence this is about crisis management (what went wrong, why and how will it be solved), and not just human interest ‘news’.
In 2004 the Internet was perhaps not the ubiquitous channel that it is now, but Salli Kakala and Hannele Seeck consider how what was still a nascent technology played a role. Conceptually they apply the idea of an agency to consider the symbols that characterized the crisis. Moreover, they suggest that how individuals posted images and pictures on the web has had a profound effect, because active citizens replace the Finnish authorities in many ways in public communication. This chapter probably identifies the most significant development in public communication in the Nordic countries.
In the final chapter, Odén et al. assess how the main news organizations in Sweden responded to catastrophe. They assume that these organizations are one of the most important audiences during a crisis. The authors note that flexibility was important in how they handled a rapidly growing story over the Christmas holiday period. A major trend they observe was that the general public turned to the media for help, rather than the authorities.
This is an interesting book which looks at crises in a slightly different way, and as a consequence is a significant addition to our knowledge. In particular, it looks at crises from a national and not organization perspective. Indeed, it is not stated but there is a clear link between Marra’s view that organizational communicative culture is important to managing a crisis. This book could easily conclude that the different communicative cultures of Finland and Sweden may explain why the political elites handled the crisis differently.
The book is an enjoyable and easy read, providing a different perspective which I have found useful to offer to students in understanding crises. However, I have two main criticisms of this book. The first could apply to most edited collections, in that each of the authors have different research questions, conceptual frameworks and methodologies which makes it difficult for the reader to pull together the different strands. This could easily have been solved by the editors providing a concluding chapter. Second, the book takes essentially an agenda-setting approach, especially around framing, that looks at the interrelation between the media, government and the public. This is fine, but I found that the first half of the book was not taking the reader as far as it might. For me the book came alive with the chapters that looked beyond the mainstream such as popular magazines and the Internet. Here is where the real lessons and conceptual ideas are to be found.
Looking through the different chapters we can identify core lessons on handling a crisis, such as communicating quickly, openly and emphatically. This reflects a lot of existing literature, but does so within a slightly different context and so is worthwhile. But for me it did feel too much like a media studies book which helped us map a crisis, and I would have liked more on the lessons for crisis management by governments and other agencies.