The Shaping Of The Government Image In The Spread Of The Crisis

This thesis is a case study based on the capsizing incident of "Eastern Star" cruise ship. Through the specific analysis of the dissemination of news on the official news website, the relationship between government crisis communication and image-building are studied. This thesis is guided by the following four questions. First, during the period of crisis,what are the contents of government's crisis communication and the repair strategies in each of the three stages — acute crisis stage, chronic crisis stage and crisis resolution stage? What are the differences among the priorities of each stage?Second, what are the gains and losses of the government in the crisis? Third, what are the specific embodiment of the interaction between the crisis communication and image-building? Fourth, how does the government solve the problems in the current crisis communication? This article adopts the scholar Fink's theory of crisis stage and Benoit's image repair theory. The main research materials of the study is taken from the special reports of "Eastern Star" in the official news website of People's Daily Online.Through the text analysis and the comparison of experience of the previous crisis communication, the main results are as follows. First, the main themes of the acute crisis stage are "basic information", "rescue work", "passenger situation","department decision-making and action"; the main themes of the chronic crisis stage are "rescue work","rehabilitation work","passenger distress situation"; the main themes of the crisis resolution stage are "investigation report" and "accountability result" The main repair strategies of all of the three stages are the same,that is, "providing information"and "corrective action". In the chronic crisis stage, the "construction of new issues" is widely used. The focus of the acute crisis stage is the crisis itself and the rescue situation.The chronic crisis stage focuses on the humanistic concern of rescue and rehabilitation.The crisis resolution stage mainly make a conclusion of the lessons learned from the crisis. Second, in the crisis, the government basically has achieved timely, accurate and transparent information publication. In these three stages, the dissemination of the key points stands out, and the communication of shaping the image and correcting the image spread throughout the whole crisis process. But there are also some problems like the wrong content of information dissemination, the sensational tendencies caused by people's too frequent reporting, single and official information sources, the lacking of the interaction between the official discourse and folk discourse. Third, crisis communication and image building are two factors which are bilateral interactive,mutually promoting or hindering. The effective crisis communication helps to improve the image of the government,and the improper communication will lead to a negative image of the government. In turn, the positive image of the government will help the crisis pull through, while bad image will increase the difficulty of dealing with the crisis.Fourth, in the era where public crisis takes place frequently,the government should strengthen the efforts of information disclosure and constantly improve the quality and quantity of the official and the folk discourse interaction. In addition, the government should parallelize the communication of shaping the image and correcting the image,and constantly optimize the way and content of interpreting government behavior.