Governmental Crisis Communication Strategies And Its Effect-A Case Study On Russian Doping Crisis

With an increasing number of international large-scale sports events hosted in China,China has attracted growing attention in the sports field,which is both an great opportunity and a big challenge.China is about to host the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics.On the one hand,by hosting such a high-profile sports event like the winter Olympics,China's international influence and national image can be significantly improved.However,on the other hand,high attention means low tolerance of fault.Any minor mistake,especially regarding to doping issue,may be magnified infinitely and become a potential crisis,which will cause immeasurable negative impact on the national image.The Russian doping crisis broken out in 2014 is a fresh lesson.Therefore,this study selected Russian doping crisis as a case,using the method of content analysis first,based on the situational crisis communication theory(SCCT),to examine crisis situation Russian government confronted in the doping crisis,and to discover crisis communication strategies Russian government applied and to analyse correlations between the two index;then,using the theory of media effectiveness,to examine the effects of the crisis communication strategies adopted by the Russian government.The study found that the Russian government has used all four main crisis communication strategies in response to the crisis of the doping scandal.The most commonly used crisis communication strategy is “denial”,which accounts for more than one third of the total number of applied strategies.In the application of substrategies,“attack accuser” is most frequently used.According to various indicators of the effectiveness of international media,the effects of communication strategy applied by Russian government in the doping crisis is unsatisfactory.In terms of international media's attitude towards Russian Government,negative attitude(53%)and neutral attitude(46%)hold an absolute majority,with almost no positive media coverage(1%).During the four stages of the crisis,the four international media experienced the change of attitude of "complete neutrality –negative growing--negative outburst--negative reduced" in their coverage of the Russian government.Contrary to the index of negative media coverage of Russian government,Russian government was cited as the main source for a relatively high percentage of sources in the international media coverage and briefly became the main source.In order to fix this contradiction,this paper adapts the index of the proportion of crisis managers cited as sources,whichis included in the media effectiveness theory,into that of proportion of crisis managers cited as the first source.In addition,this study also found that :(1)when confronting the accident-type crisis with insufficient accusation evidence,the crisis managerbetter uses diminish strategy if without a similar crisis history;(2)under false crisis situation,the crisis manager cannot use denial strategy,not even to say mixing the denial strategy with the diminishment strategy or the rebuilding strategy;(3)Russian government's use of crisis communication strategy was inconsistent with its actual actions,which is frequently accused by international media.It can be concluded that crisis communication strategy works only when it is matched by corresponding actions.