10/4 Select 3
–
4 quotes from any of the readings
that resonated with you (either because of the insight or
explanation they provide) from at least 2 of the
assigned
readings. Students should describe the context of
the quotes in re
lation to the rest of the article as well as why you chose those particular passages.
488722
2013
JOU15210.1177/1464884913488722JournalismConboy
Article
Celebrity journalism – An
oxymoron? Forms and
functions of a genre
Journalism
2014, Vol. 15(2) 171–185
© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1464884913488722
jou.sagepub.com
Martin Conboy
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Debate about the ideal content or purpose of journalism is as old as print itself. The
messy characteristics of popular culture have always intruded into the high principles
and purposes of the communication of politics and journalism’s intentions to provide
information of importance for the public. In the intensity of the contemporary media
era it is necessary to reconsider the interplay between celebrity news and journalism:
beyond oxymoron and towards the appreciation of a paradox. This contribution
seeks to explore some of the forms and functions of celebrity news in contemporary
British culture and speculates on the increasing relevance of celebrity to the future of
journalism.
Keywords
Britain, celebrity, global media, national, popular culture, rhetoric, tabloid
‘Celebrity news – an oxymoron’ was the provocative and yet productive title of a conference organized at the University of Geneva in September 2010. Oxymoron is a figure of
speech which combines contradictory qualities for literary effect. Celebrity journalism,
if an oxymoron, would suggest that journalism is incompatible with the coverage of
celebrity issues and that the juxtaposition of these two nouns demonstrates that journalism cannot be considered to be upholding its true purpose if it is dealing with celebrity.
However, this begs the question what is journalism’s true purpose and assumes that the
coverage of celebrity does not match a higher set of ideals.
A paradox, a contradiction which can be revealed on closer inspection to be no contradiction at all but merely a baffling truth, is, in fact, a better articulation of the characteristics of journalism over many years. The word ‘journalism’ enters the English
Corresponding author:
Martin Conboy, Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, 18–22 Regent Street, Minalloy
House, Sheffield S1 3NJ, UK.
Email: m.conboy@sheffield.ac.uk
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Journalism 15(2)
language in 1833 in large part as an attempt to categorize an activity which had come to
be understood as a yoking together of aspects of elite information and commentary with
lower cultural narratives of scandal and crime (Campbell, 2000). Journalism contains
information and entertainment, can divert and concentrate the mind, and is vital to
democracy and to the well-oiled functioning of the rumour mill. It owes, according to
many of its more principled practitioners as well as its political advocates, an allegiance
to the democratic good but only persists because it can make sizable profits for global
conglomerates. As a complicating factor, it is not simply either/or, it is very often a shuttling between or a balance between these poles.
Early popular material in Western Europe such as ballads and broadsheets were as
obsessive as our contemporary electronic media universe about the famous and the notorious as part of a commercially successful print culture. In England these representations
can tell an observer a great deal about the morality and popular tastes of the time. From
the 17th century, fictional heroes such as Robin Hood and King Arthur acted as exemplary, mythical role models, and tales of moral improvement of folk from humble origins
fitted into a sententious, quasi-religious cultural landscape such as that of John
Hawkwood, the tailor’s apprentice made good or Tom Hickathrift, the giant-slaying son
of a labourer. This tone changed with the upheavals of the English Civil War as characters such as Royalist highwayman Captain James Hind and master thief Richard Hannam
were presented as characters whose notoriety flowed from their mocking the social proprieties of the time and exposing the hypocrisies of the new order (Friedman, 1993).
The tropes of fame, notoriety and celebrity, although all slightly different categories,
have always been unified in their role as indicators of concern about some social or cultural phenomenon beyond their immediate subject matter. Inglis (2010) claims that
celebrity as we understand it in the contemporary world begins in the 18th century. The
key figures in the emergence of an identifiable celebrity culture were, according to this
thesis, Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire and the painter Joshua Reynolds. The Duchess
of Devonshire’s life and loves were played out as a mediated public spectacle while
Reynolds’ skill as a portraitist brought fame to his wealthy patrons as well as to himself.
This new dimension to public attention drew upon the interplay between the mediation
of personality and popular admiration which began to structure a new level of intensity
in the public scrutiny of the wealthy and the famous.
Braudy (1997) claims that fame (as distinguished from celebrity) in western culture,
prior to the modern era of mass media, had been dependent on either the trappings of
public office or on notable, heroic deeds. This may well have been the case in elite culture but popular print culture had consistently celebrated a more everyday sort of notoriety in the activities of outlaws and highway men and, by the 19th century, ‘Last Will and
Testament’-style publications had been perfected as a commercially lucrative formula.
These were popular as moral codas to lives spent in wickedness because they combined
a vicarious thrill with the prospect of possible salvation.
Despite having quibbled with any notion of a fixed starting date for the celebrity phenomenon, it is clear that the commercialization of the 19th-century mass media was a
significant constituent of celebrity, as rival publications for a popular market sought to
privilege their own position in relation to popular cultural figures in order to enhance
their profitability and their claims to be keeping pace with the increasingly influential
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notion of popular taste. This found expression in coverage of the professional and private
lives of prize-fighters, opera singers, leading stage actors and music hall performers.
The thrill of vicarious connections via print media to the highs and lows in the lives
of the rich and famous continued along familiar patterns until the early 20th century. The
‘stars’ in the divorce courts at this point were taken as broadly indicative of upper-class
corruption and were exploited because of this, particularly by left-leaning newspapers
like the Daily Herald (Bingham, 2009: 133–144). This dangerous exposure to the potential of lower-class ridicule and contempt was something which hastened the passing of
the Divorce Courts Act in 1926. However, at this point, the rise of cinema and the development of sensationalized reporting in a whole range of mass popular newspapers in the
UK extended the tradition in different ways (Conboy, 2011).
Connell (1992) has claimed that celebrity coverage acts as a commentary on the disparity between social classes and the resultant gulf in wealth in western societies and that
such observation does not find an expression elsewhere in our mediascape, concluding
that the popular tabloids have generated a necessary if limited awareness of these discrepancies. We might add that since Connell provided this insight, celebrity has diversified to act as a prismatic panorama on contemporary discourses on gender, sexual
morality, politics, national identity and mental health – in fact most aspects of contemporary life. Nevertheless, this coverage falls well short of any critique or commentary
beyond its melodramatic moralism (Gripsrud, 1992). A notable recent example was
when a winner of £9.7 million on the UK National Lottery, Michael Carroll, an ex-bin
man, lost all of the money in a short period of reckless spending and investment. He was
regularly castigated in the blue-collar Sun as Lotto Yobbo, in effect demonstrating that he
had been given an opportunity which was unsuitable for one of such lowly status and by
29 April 2005 he was dubbed the ‘King of the Chavs’ by the Daily Mirror. Coverage
across the tabloids highlighted his anti-social behaviour, court appearances, bad taste in
clothes and fondness for brash displays of wealth. Almost by definition a case of the
undeserving rich, it provided an inverted fairy story for our age; a rags to rags story very
much in keeping with the narrative shape of the modern celebrity morality tale.
Incorporating celebrity
This piece is an attempt to provide a narrative account of the accretion of celebrity within
news, not a taxonomy of the phenomenon of celebrity itself. It is worth therefore repeating that the process of the incorporation of celebrity culture within our news media is a
long one. Turner (2004) helpfully divides modern celebrity into two categories: the film
star and the television personality. The first has an aura, a managed mystique which
serves to separate the star from the public while keeping them very much in their minds.
This analysis builds on the pioneering work of Dyer (1979). The second form of celebrity
is more accessible and is attractive on account of the fact that they are much more prone
to the vicissitudes and chaos of the everyday. This coming together of celebrity with the
everyday allows a significant amount of commentary on moral and ethical issues in the
domestic sphere which had not previously been regular features of news. The everydayness of celebrity news becomes amplified with the proliferation of melodramatic storylines (e.g. soaps on television from the 1970s and 1980s onwards) and melodramatic
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entertainment formulae from the 1990s where a combination of celebrities and ordinary
people become the stars of television contests.
There is also a technological chain in motion here. Television triggered certain
changes in the news media ecology with its entertainment-driven structure and visuality,
which encouraged newspapers to go further in their deployment of news categories,
moving them closer to traditions of gossip and hearsay than they had been previously as
television became increasingly proficient at presenting the news first. This in turn
impacted on television, which was also forced to include more on the sort of news the
newspapers were printing for fear of appearing out of date, behind the times or off the
popular pulse.
Newspapers, in their increasing need to provide big names to attract readers, began to
routinely use by-lines and then photo-enhanced by-lines to combat television’s use of
personality news anchors from the arrival of ITN in 1955. Newspapers increased their
share of opinion, which included oblique commentary on the lives and lifestyles of those
in the public eye. Bromley observed this trend as it gathered momentum through the
1990s:
At first, the ‘quality’ press ignored the substantive issues of tabloid news; then decried them.
These papers … subsequently began reporting and commenting on the behaviour of the tabloid
press, which led to the vicarious reporting of the issues themselves. Finally, the broadsheet
papers, too, carried the same news items. (1998: 31)
Through the 1990s and 2000s those celebrity anchors became increasingly employed as
leads in a variety of other news spin-offs, celebrity games shows and televised competitions. At the same time, one of the primary functions of newspapers in democratic culture
has been relegated to a secondary position as the views of the opinion-brokering journalists have gained supremacy over the words of the politicians themselves (Thomas, 2005).
Celebrity, having become increasingly embedded within the popular tabloids, has spread
rapidly to all news media to become an essential structuring device of much of the contemporary information flow. Celebrity across the board has become one of the stand-bys
in maintaining the specific market appeal of newspapers into the 21st century. In the digital era, newspapers in their old-style newspaper format still act as brand identifiers for
news media activities and are, though in decline, still an important, popular and profitable part of news media operations. It is often through their engagement with celebrity
that they maintain a lead over online sources as they are better resourced and can pry
more consistently than the amateur blogger or paparazzo. So we can conclude that celebrity has, as one of its functions, the extension of the influence of newspapers into the new
century by enabling them to become integrated enough within popular cultural patterns
to hold off media which may at first sight be more technologically attuned to contemporary demands.
Sparks (1992: 37–38) argues that the forms of address and language of the British
popular press form an important part of its own distinctive news values. This language
lies within the traditions of working-class entertainment and is thereby more connected
to everyday life and tends to relegate the serious to a secondary place and foregrounds
the carnival and the colloquial (Conboy, 2002).
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Despite the fact that the content and influence of tabloid news media worldwide generate a great deal of hostility from elite commentators, it emerges from the complex of
commercial and social exigencies which drive the whole globalized media market.
Comparisons of tabloid media with idealized versions of what the news ought to be
doing ignore the historical evidence that tabloid news and its various predecessors in
popular print culture have always sought to contest dominant bourgeois values. The tabloid press are located within, and draw on, the ‘popular’ traditions of entertainment and
consumption, rather than attempting to provide a single, bourgeois form of rational public debate (Bromley and Tumber, 1998: 365). From a social perspective, it is because of
the close association of these news media forms with the ordinary people as consumers
that investigating the value of certain varieties of news media brings us into what Sparks
calls ‘the explosive territory of social worth’ (2000: 29).
Tabloidization is too complex a phenomenon to judge as a single entity and too fraught
with questions of taste and commercialism for simple judgements on its quality. It can
either be considered as a lowering of the standards of an idealized journalism or a reorientation of popular national markets within globalized competition for news.
According to this latter perspective, it may be considered neither a good nor a bad set of
processes but simply a pragmatic approach to maintaining a market share using the
familiar strategy of constructing an appeal to an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson,
1987) of nation which has traditionally structured the content of news. This may not be
to the tastes of established social elites and it may not serve the political interests of the
politically marginalized either, but little mainstream commercial journalism ever has.
Whannel has concluded that this process has led to a more populist mode of address and
a restructuring of the relationship between subject of the news and consumer in which
areas of life once resolutely private are now in the public domain (2010: 72).
Some might argue that such a cultural flattening has a broad democratic potential. Yet
Turner (2004), referring critically to this notion as ‘democratainment’, queries any
assumption that by broadening access to entertainment media we are in any way necessarily broadening access to democratic involvement in politics. Media involvement does
not equate to political involvement and in fact might actually militate against it. The
popular tabloid newspapers are simply competing in what may be a last-ditch battle to
maintain their market appeal. Yet the fact is that despite much fascination with their
decline in readerships they are still extraordinarily popular, both in their old-style print
form where they still sell millions of copies per day – a healthy performance indeed,
compared to many new media outlets – and also in their penetration of other media outlets as a paradigm for new forms of popular communication. Even if they disappeared
tomorrow, the impact of the popular tabloids on broader media culture would be of enormous significance.
Tabloid celebrity: Rhetoric and community
So let us consider the contours of celebrity rhetoric as one of the means by which popular
tabloids attempt to maintain their readerships. Celebrity coverage has long been a mainstay of popular tabloid newspapers in Britain. It has been crafted into a witty and marketable approach to news which appeals to audiences which have evolved as part of a more
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generalized tabloid culture inside and outside these papers. We begin by considering some
of the ways in which rhetorical features are used in the tabloids, which in combination
generate a tone specific to their market ambitions. The patterning of these features plays a
big part in providing the ideological cohesion important for any newspaper’s sense of
editorial identity. With the popular tabloids, this identity is predicated on an exclusively
populist set of assumptions about its target audience. Bell has called the language of newspapers an exercise in audience design (1984: 145–204) and this is certainly demonstrated
by the tabloids and their confident grasp of the identity of their ideal reader. It has been
argued that it is in the language of different types of newspapers, not in their layout, that
the distinction lies; between the neutral language of those aiming to be considered as serious newspapers of record and the ‘emotionally charged’ language of the popular tabloids
(Kitis and Milapedes, 1997: 562). Language is employed across the popular tabloid paper
in a systematic way to build a composite version of the vocabulary and style of their ideal
average reader; a sort of vernacular ventriloquism (Conboy, 2002: 162).
For the purposes of this brief study, it might be said that it is in the two-way process
between language and reader that ‘ideology is inscribed in social practice’ (Hodge and
Kress, 1993: 210). This ideological relationship makes sense of the world and reduces
contradictory elements in a language which amplifies references to popular culture, television shows, populist politics and, most importantly for our purposes, celebrity. An
essential part of tabloid news values has always been the exaggerated foregrounding of
sensation and ‘human interest’. These features have the effect of structuring the world in
a way which rejects fundamental political issues and focuses instead on random events
within a world of common sense (Curran et al., 1980). This concentration on sensation
and human interest means that the tabloids tend to feature people at the extremes of
human experience and behaviour.
Familiar names
Familiar names and nicknames are a characteristic device, deployed in the popular tabloids as a bridge of familiarity, connecting readers to a world outside the confines of their
lived experience. The language of familiarity when relating to celebrities reinforces the
linkage between the tabloid news agenda and broader aspects of popular culture, including television, film and popular music. Such intertextuality is what assists in the broad
‘cultural discourse’ (Dahlgren, 1988: 289) of modern popular journalism. The framing of
such characters in the language of familiarity helps to establish the ‘naturalness’ of the
presence of these people and their affairs in the pages of the newspaper, while at the same
time helping the popular press justify how it sidelines more serious issues about the contemporary world in favour of what it claims its readers want. On a single day of the Sun
we can see two examples of the first name and nickname treatment of two footballing
celebrities. First, Ashley Cole, whose status has been amplified because of his marriage
with Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Cole, who has herself gone on to survive a sensationalized divorce from her serially unfaithful footballer husband and has become even more
famous because of her role as a judge on the X-Factor. To match a picture of Ashley Cole
sharing a pipe with a photogenic female smoker, we have the caption: ‘Ashley hookahs
up with lookah’ (White, 2011: 3).
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Further into the newspaper we have a story centring on Wayne Rooney. Two women
who claim to have been offered money for sex with the Manchester United and England
striker celebrate a birthday with ‘Roo’ as the animated character he is alleged to resemble, Shrek, sculptured in icing in between figures of the two ‘vice-girls’: ‘Roo’s hookers
are vicing on the cake’ (Patrick, 2011: 1).
In the Daily Mirror we see another rhetorical headlining of a first name to demonstrate the proximity of reader with television soap opera: ‘COLLEEN CUTS LOOSE /
Star: I am leaving the show / COLLEEN Nolan has shocked Loose Women fans by
announcing that she has decided to quit the award-winning show after 10 years’ (Methuen,
2011b: 9).
Another of the more obvious rhetorical strategies through which the tabloids attempt
to reinforce their relationship with their readership is by employing colloquial expressions and slang in relation to celebrity coverage. This appears to allow the newspapers to
talk to a readership in its own, informal manner and further extends the claim of these
papers to be on the side of the people, leading discussion in a highly constructed version
of the language of the people. The implication of this language is that the tabloids are on
the side of the people as readers and opposed to the interests of the power-bloc (Fiske,
1994). It is a deliberate strategy to cement that ideological bond with a readership which
sees itself as sceptical of the establishment and, by implication, the formalities of its
language.
News values – The elite British nation
The vast majority of newspapers are sold on a national basis, have a strong national bias
to their news values and, in Billig’s words, ‘flag the homeland daily’ (1995). Yet this bias
is even more pronounced in the tabloids as they exaggerate the nationally specific while
in the main ignoring international news. Some have observed this as one of the defining
features of the tabloid newspaper (McLachlan and Golding, 2000). Daily newspapers and
most explicitly the tabloids can be observed performing a crucial semiotic role in cementing the national form (Law, 2001: 299). This is arguably at its most effective when the
lexicon of the nation is presented in a ‘banal’ fashion (Billig, 1995), enabling it to retain a
background but daily presence as one of the key structuring norms of the newspapers.
Celebrities assist in the commodification of a very British sphere which is specifically
contemporary. This is to be contrasted to the other powerful axis in the construction of
popular narratives of nation in the tabloids which is replete with historical references.
One significant variation of the tabloid pattern has been the American supermarket
tabloid, which is an export triumph for a globalized variation of American popular culture. While the American model highlights a particular form of global Hollywood celebrity gossip (Bird, 1992; Sloan, 2001), the British version is a more proletarian model of
tabloid celebrity which focuses much more on television personalities which are restricted
in the main to the national. This is reinforced by the axiomatic consequence of the tendency in British tabloid newspapers to concentrate less on foreign news, which gives an
even more nationalistic slant to their content.
Nationally based news media have an important if paradoxical role in the contemporary global environment as, it must be stressed, the nationalist-orientated tabloids are in
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turn a part of global media corporations. They fit one of the defining patterns of contemporary identity formation in the intensified awareness of difference brought about by the
latest phase of globalization in which:
The driving imperative is to salvage centred, bounded and coherent identities … it is about the
maintenance of protective illusion, about the struggle for wholeness and coherence through
continuity. (Morley and Robins, 1995: 122)
National news may exist within global communication conglomerates but it needs a
strong local resonance for its continued success. Britain in the popular tabloids is not
created as some elitist political activity but as part of a populist, market-driven engagement with the pre-existing myths and language of a popular nation.
The following example demonstrates something of the ability of popular tabloid language to play with words and focuses on a celebrity-driven news story which goes to the
heart of a serious issue concerning the ethnic identification of contemporary Britain. The
producer of a long-running detective drama on commercial television claimed in an
interview with the Radio Times that its success was in large part due to the fact that there
were no black characters in the show and that this added to its appeal to an audience who
were happy with a nostalgic view of Britain as a place without the complexities of a
multi-cultural society. The Daily Mirror had the story on its front page but with John
Nettles the celebrity star of the series as the photo-illustration, not the much less wellknown producer. Nettles’ presence illustrating the story is ironic given the wellpublicized decision of the actor some months previously to retire from it: ‘MIDSOMER
RACE RAGE’. Inside, the story unfolds in more detail, punning on ‘White’ for ‘Right’:
‘A White Idiot. Midsomer creator axed after he claims “No blacks” rule is key to drama’s
success’ (Methuen, 2011a: 9).
The Sun leads with a picture of star Nettles in its own report on the inside pages:
‘RACE ROW MIDSOMER BOSS AXED. ITV fury at “Englishness rant”’ (Holmwood,
2011: 17). This story and the way it easily fits within the rhetoric and stylistic approach
of the popular tabloids, leading on celebrity within television culture even in a story
where a serious matter of ethnic sensitivity is at stake, demonstrates how skilled the tabloids are in using celebrity hooks to maintain and amplify intertextual links for their
target audience and implicitly use them to generate discussion about the state of contemporary Britain.
Celebrity and national community
Much has been written about the trend towards the inclusion of more celebrity-based
news in our media in general. The tabloids are leading this trend towards a more generalized tabloid culture (Biressi and Nunn, 2005) in their representation of Britain as a community of interrelated media celebrities and compounding it with a style of language
which matches that culture. The tabloids do not only report on the lives of celebrities, they
use this information to enhance as many stories as they can with a plethora of intertextual
references to them. On the one hand it may be claimed that this ‘democratizes’ the news,
moving it away from its traditional insistence on the elites of society and a preponderance
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of political and financial reports, yet at the same time, it may also limit the reach of the
news agenda and furthermore, restrict the people who can be considered as ‘elite persons’
(Galtung and Ruge, 1965) but in different ways.
Celebrity has always formed an important part of the news but it has ‘expanded and
multiplied in recent years’ (Turner, 2004: 4). In doing so as part of the formation of mediated social identity it has begun to play an even fuller part in the construction of an
imagined Britain for a national audience. The tabloids have been particularly astute in
harnessing and even directing this trend:
… the British tabloids have almost categorically redefined what qualifies for them as news, so
that tabloid news is now utterly personalised and dominated by the actions of well-known
people – politicians, public officials, sportsmen and women, celebrities, soon-to-be celebrities
and wanna-be celebrities. (Turner, 2004: 75)
Banality and tragedy
Celebrity lives are often represented as two-dimensional roller coaster rides between elation and depression, a dynamic which certainly fits neatly with the overall binary nature
of popular tabloid news structures. In fact, celebrity is one of the few semiotic hooks
which can be used to report on the general topic of disease. It allows the mundane facts
of illness and death a newsworthiness which gives readers an opportunity to read about
issues which would not otherwise be covered in the paper unless they are associated with
a well-known celebrity face and the language associated with the world of the stars. The
celebrity connection which is used as a conduit to readers’ empathy may be an attempt to
humanize the problem and to relate it in terms which readers will grasp, but the very
tabloid techniques and expressions risk trivializing the problem. The following two
examples illustrate the delicate balancing involved in such coverage. First, flagged as an
exclusive to be continued the next day, is a story of a television celebrity who has starred
in Loose Women, Lynda Bellingham. She reveals in a characteristic blend of revelation
and call for sympathy on a personal level, her battle with alcoholism, not a newsworthy
topic when unrelated to celebrity: ‘MY STORY / Loose Women Lynda tells all / Secret
sadness drove me to drink / My shame over one-night stand / Night I thought of ending
it all’ (Bellingham, 2011: 1).
The second story, perhaps less obvious as a genre than the revelations of the reformed
alcoholic actor, is from television presenter Denise van Outen who had decided to withdraw from the media spotlight as she feared her heavy workload was impairing her fertility. This is told in the section of the Sun named ‘Sun Woman’: Shock of low fertility
made me quit job to try for baby (Watkins, 2011a: 36–37).
On the previous day in the same section of the newspaper was a story which combined
the sort of cross-generational discussion of health issues which would not make the paper
unless given a celebrity tag: ‘What my mother taught me. Patsy Kensit Actress / Mum
had cancer but hit back with positive thinking’ (Watkins, 2011b: 35).
Even within a global economy, this local vernacular is an essential part of the appeal of
these newspapers as conduits for a national culture with all of the commercial strengths and
political weaknesses which such national cultures continue to generate. The performativity
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of language in the narratives of the nation (Bhabha, 1990: 3) is an essential tool in the construction and maintenance of the tabloid version of Britain today. Celebrity coverage and
the rhetoric of the popular press which have become such influential constituents of the
contemporary British media are a key part of that performative process.
The functions of celebrity journalism
Beyond the rhetorical appeal of the vernacular of the popular tabloids we can look briefly
at four of its chief contemporary usages. The case of Lord Triesman demonstrates one of
the functions of celebrity news, with its collapse of distinctions between private and
public sphere, here exacerbated by the proactive hand of the news media themselves. A
consideration of whether in normal circumstances, Triesman would have been considered a celebrity makes us reflect that celebrity journalism has more to do with the function of celebrity stories than with the status of the celebrities themselves. On 16 May
2010, the Mail on Sunday revealed that Melissa Jacobs had secretly tape-recorded David
Triesman in a restaurant. Triesman was the chairman of the English Football Association.
During their meal, he made comments about alleged bribery attempts by Spain and
Russia of referees during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. On 18 May 2010 celebrity columnist and television presenter Gary Lineker, also a former international footballer and
Ambassador for England’s 2018 World Cup bid, announced he was resigning from his
columnist’s position on the paper as in his view the piece had damaged England’s chances
of success. The story is alleged to have cost the paper £75,000 to procure and could be
viewed as a flagrant abuse of private space. This was a meeting between former lovers in
a confidential setting and the former aide went equipped to tape and presumably sell on
any information indiscreetly let slip by the FA chairman. Willingness of a national newspaper to print this demonstrates an absolute corruption of private life in which nobody
can trust their interlocuter not to be wired for profit. It might be argued that this is an
inevitable consequence of broad celebrity trends in popular culture, enabling some of the
shabbier practices of tabloid newspapers to mesh with media entertainments where participants divulge their every thought before the camera. The difference here is that a
private meal is not in the public domain and that the usual defence of ‘public interest’
could not really be demonstrated here.
The second case to consider is that of John Suchet. Suchet had been an ITN newscaster for 30 years. He was a face familiar to millions of television viewers in the UK.
When his wife, Bonnie, was diagnosed with dementia, he started a private journal to
chart his emotions during this challenging time for him, his wife and his family. In
February 2009 he spoke for the first time to the national press, advised by dementia
charities that his intervention would help to publicize the disease. In May 2010 the book
My Bonnie: How Dementia Stole the Love of My Life was published to widespread news
media coverage, demonstrating how a high-profile, celebrity name can boost the visibility of what would normally be considered a private issue, in this case, a health issue, in
the public eye as well as softening and even ‘ageing’ the news agenda. Without the celebrity endorsement, such private suffering in individual cases is rarely covered and, when
it is, it tends to be in terms of abstractions and statistics at the elite end or the discourse
of miracle cures at the popular tabloid end of the newspaper market.
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Richards (2007: 97–98) claims that we are in the midst of ‘a cultural transformation
in which politics and policies in the traditional sense are becoming more enmeshed with
the personal, with psychological considerations and with emotionality’. This implies that
celebrity is a social interaction, but one in which the media performance of celebrity is
not a democratic enhancement but more a part of the news media’s entertainment function or at best an aspect of its ability to prompt empathization as in the Suchet case.
Interestingly, Inglis (2010) remarks in his history of celebrity that it has been accompanied by a rise in the public display of emotion very much encapsulated in this story.
Our third example relates to royalty and ex-royalty. Sarah Ferguson promised an
undercover reporter from the News of the World access to her ex-husband, the Duke of
York, for £500,000 and this was duly reported in that paper on 3 May 2010. It provides
an example about how this sort of celebrity scandal fishing-trip, so carefully choreographed by the News of the World in particular, reflects upon our popular morality. This
point was reinforced by acerbic commentary in elite newspaper the Guardian on 26 May.
This becomes somewhat of a specialist area for cultural commentator Hadley Freeman,
who pursues this tone in another assessment of the intrusion of Naomi Campbell and
Wyclef Jean into world politics in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ online section on
11 August. And as if to confirm the provocative nature of the piece, the online readers’
forum has a full range of views on the content of the piece, its place on the website and
the role of celebrities in contemporary elite news media.
One view commonly articulated on the Guardian website, in printed readers’ letters
and general critical commentary in the academy, is that celebrity unchained, just like any
of the other aspects of journalism out of kilter with its composite whole, could bring the
variety and the wider social responsibilities of journalism to an end. If celebrity is being
amplified within the discourses of contemporary journalism, to the extent that it begins
to drown out the other features of the balanced ecology which has maintained the
dynamic of traditional journalism, then journalism could be in grave danger.
A fourth celebrity function goes to the heart of the practice and performance of journalism itself. Celebrity functions in a variety of ways, often contradictorily with respect
to the journalists themselves. It might well be that prominent interviewers such as the
BBC’s Paxman and Humphrys are extending the democratic probing of politicians on
behalf of the public, exploiting their status as ‘public inquisitors’ (Higgins, 2010).
Journalists themselves have, after all, often featured as the main attraction. Despite anonymity across much of the respectable press, English radical authors and sensationalist
crusaders from Cobbett to Stead were the prototypes of these later celebrity journalists.
The commercial appeal of such opinionated, high-profile journalists began to be exploited
in the mainstream, starting with celebrity gossip columnists and moving on to celebrity
cross-over television personalities and political pundits.
Celebrity journalists are now being used, particularly on the BBC, as a subtle form of
cross-promotion, exploiting the brand of the famous presenter to add consumer appeal to
other programmes beyond their usual journalistic patch: for example, Andrew Marr
(Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; The Making of Modern Britain), Jeremy Paxman (University
Challenge), Fiona Bruce (Police, Camera, Action; Antiques Roadshow), David Dimbleby
(Seven Ages of Britain), John Humphrys (Mastermind), and always at least one featured
in Strictly Come Dancing (Christine Bleakely, Chris Hollins). Celebrification of
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Journalism 15(2)
journalists here acts as a guarantor of audience ratings; journalists as the ultimate news
media brands. The problem for the BBC is that in increasing the visibility of their celebrity journalists they are also inflating the journalists’ expectations of larger salary packages, which in certain high-profile cases is now leading to a showdown with a government
which sees excessive pay as an abuse of public money.
The vortex of contemporary celebrity
The whole process of celebrity is followed within a set of expectations from both producers and consumers. The status has, first, to be gained and then managed and sustained for
as long as possible within the mediation which has caused the celebrity to be summoned
into being in the first place. How this is effected becomes part of the aesthetic appeal and
attraction of the celebrity story, in much the same way as any melodrama depends for its
success on the fascination of the reader towards the length of time that the protagonist
can maintain the equilibrium; spinning plates or keeping a voraciously sceptical audience satisfied!
Media celebrities can become exemplary figures to an audience and even role models
from whom it is invited to learn. When this celebrity function is deployed in the bluecollar press to isolate and denigrate working-class readers who have had success in their
lives (Jade Goody and Carroll, both from 2002) then the hierarchical boundaries are not
collapsed (Featherstone, 1991: 48) but depend on this use of celebrity coverage to consolidate the distance across the social spectrum and codify the separation in class terms
for a new era. Yet this pattern can be inverted if circumstances change. Once she was
diagnosed with cancer, Jade Goody became the ‘people’s commoner’ (Picardie, 2009),
somebody with whom it became difficult not to sympathize as an almost epiphanous
character in a real-life soap opera of self-discovery.
The contemporary celebrity is a fascinatingly unstable construct able to be shifted
or reformulated into a more suitable set of meanings as a storyline changes. In an
interesting attempt to provide an explanation for the nature of this instability,
Whannel (2010) coins the term ‘vortextuality’ to describe the speed and intensity of
contemporary cross-media fertilization of stories about celebrities which are made
possible by the use of new technologies which have assisted in the erosion of any
meaningful demarcation between public and private spheres. Two of his proposed
transformations of the social category of news over the last 30 years have a great
deal of relevance to this discussion. The first is the erosion of the distinction between
public and private and the second are the ‘processes of personalization and individualization of news which have contributed to the emergence of a celebrity-centred
popular culture’ (2010: 71).
Conclusion
Marshall sees celebrity culture as part of a process which is potentially ‘widening the
public sphere’ (2010: 40), but Turner, in pronouncing it a ‘demotic turn’ (2004: 82–85)
rather than a necessarily democratic one, remains sceptical that the fascination of the
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183
Conboy
media with the everyday is anything more than an astute representation of media openness rather than any genuine enhancement of the media’s democratic functions. Beyond
the political functions of celebrity journalism what are its social functions? The use of
celebrity gossip is an extension of the uses of gossip within a community as a form
of social control (Marshall, 2010: 37). This certainly fits into longer patterns of coverage
of famous personalities in the news media.
Celebrity culture may democratize access to knowledge of aspects of individuals’
lives but it does little to democratize access to the analysis. Popular culture reverts to the
old distinction between stories and analysis (Humpherys, 1990; Van Leeuwen, 1987).
We are drawn increasingly into details of individuals’ lives and yet denied access to any
broader picture. The shock, horror presides over the explanation.
Celebrity journalism provides a broad, rich and often disturbing panorama of the characters of contemporary life. The specific historical nature of capitalism may mean that
‘celebrity’ is a very different economic and cultural category than its predecessors – fame
and notoriety – but the appeal of coverage of persons in the public gaze has lost not of its
lustre or financial incentive to the news media. Tabloid culture has developed to the extent
that it has an impact even when the elite press are drawn into condemnation of the same
forces of tabloidization. Celebrity poses questions familiar to journalism: questions about
the worth and significance of social developments; questions about the place and function
of public communicators; questions about the balance in our news agenda between the
serious and the trivial. These questions form part of a longer elite suspicion of popular
culture in general. Elite culture is more perturbed as it observes popular culture making
inroads into almost every aspect of our contemporary media world. Perhaps most concerns about contemporary celebrity coverage have much to do with an implicit decline
from the golden age of ‘worthy fame’ and are as bound up with the foregrounding of
lower-class parvenus such as sports stars and lottery winners as in revealing the more
sordid sides of wealth and power.
Journalism has always been a complex conflation of complementary and contradictory impulses. Contemporary journalism manifests social, technological and cultural complexity in its performance. These four minor key examples illustrate
something of the range of uses that celebrity journalism can be put to. Celebrity is one
area of that contemporary complexity which can present the world as a more emotionalized, personalized place, very unlike traditional journalistic views of the world; can
demonstrate the breakdown in human relationships by the pandering of news media
to self-interested muckraking; and can provide acerbic commentary on the phenomenon itself and on journalism’s desire to remain so fascinated by it. Journalism clearly
does not deal with celebrity in any one mode. Journalism is not an ideal product but
it is often one which suffers from a tendency to idealizations. One such idealization is
the temptation to eject celebrity coverage as either having limited relevance to the
higher purposes of the practice or insisting on a one-dimensional representation of the
contemporary world.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
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Journalism 15(2)
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Author biography
Martin Conboy is Professor of Journalism History at the University of Sheffield. He is also the
co-director of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History based in Sheffield. His research
interests include the representation of national identity, popular journalism and the language of
journalism. He is the author of eight books on various approaches to the study of journalism and is
on the editorial boards of Journalism Studies; Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; Media
History; Memory Studies. He is also the co-editor of the book series Journalism Studies: Key Texts.
Downloaded from jou.sagepub.com at UNIV OF NEW HAMPSHIRE on October 13, 2015
Communication Studies
Vol. 68, No. 4, September–October 2017, pp. 385–402
Restorative Rhetoric and Social
Media: An Examination of the Boston
Marathon Bombing
Gregory A. Williams, Chelsea L. Woods, & Nicole C. Staricek
This study analyzes Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s rhetoric via Twitter following the
Boston Marathon Bombing, exploring how a leader engaged in crisis communication
using social media. Guided by restorative rhetoric, we examine how Menino included
strategic communication (alleviate risk and restore public safety) and humanistic
communication (focusing on the more substantive issues of crisis leadership) in his
tweets. Our analysis is grounded in the five tenets of restorative rhetoric as a theoretical
lens: initial reaction; assessment of the crisis; issues of blame; healing and forgiveness;
and corrective action and rebuilding through a rhetorical vision. The findings demonstrate the utility of social media in aiding leaders as they provide critical information
and guidance amid high uncertainty while also initiating the healing process, including
fostering resilience.
Keywords: Crisis; Resilience; Restorative Rhetoric; Social Media; Terrorism
Research suggests a community’s response to a crisis event is largely influenced by
how the event is depicted in the media and by public leaders (Boin & ‘T Hart, 2007;
Murch, 1971). Crises are specific, surprising, and generate high levels of uncertainty
and perceived danger (Seeger, Vennette, Ulmer, & Sellnow, 2002) leading individuals
to seek additional information (Spence, Lachlan, & Westerman, 2009). One particular
form of crisis, terrorism, presents unique challenges to crisis managers because of its
Gregory A. Williams (MA, Southern Illinois University, 2014) is a data coordinator with the Department of Surgery,
Washington University, St. Louis. Chelsea L. Woods (PhD, University of Kentucky, 2017) is Assistant Professor with the
Department of Communication, Virginia Tech. Nicole C. Staricek (MA, Auburn University, 2011) is a doctoral candidate
with the Department of Communication, University of Kentucky. Correspondence to: Chelsea L. Woods, Virginia Tech,
Department of Communication, 121 Shanks Hall (Mail Code 0311), Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. E-mail: clwoods@vt.
edu
ISSN 1051-0974 (print)/ISSN 1745-1035 (online) © 2017 Central States Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2017.1340901
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intentional nature, high psychological effects on the public, and extreme levels of
damage (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010; Ulmer, Sellnow, & Seeger, 2011). Historically, publics sought information from the media (Murch, 1971) because they are a
valuable and trusted resource (Heath, Liao, & Douglas, 1995). More recently, social
media sites provided new avenues for information seeking (Veil, Buehner, &
Palenchar, 2011) and have been embraced by government agencies to meet their
crisis communication goals (Hughes & Palen, 2012; Sutton et al., 2014).
The primary goals of public officials’ crisis responses are to issue accurate, timely,
and useful information while simultaneously helping victims and restoring order
(Seeger, 2006). Leaders who engage in communication via social media can respond
to and communicate with their communities instantaneously rather than being limited
to using traditional mediated channels, such as television or print media (Spence &
Lachlan, 2016). This capability is essential during a crisis when leaders are called upon
to manage and distribute information (Ulmer et al., 2011). However, how officials
communicate with the public in response to terrorism events, particularly using social
media, is understudied (Ruggiero & Vos, 2013).
Understanding how public officials and community leaders utilize social media during a
crisis warrants attention. Effective communication responses to an event on social media can
help the public make sense of the situation (Rubin, Amlot, Page, & Wessely, 2008), reduce
their anxiety (King, 2005) and strengthen community resilience (Kirschenbaum, 2004). To
better understand how social media may be used by community leaders during a crisis, we
examine Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s response to the Boston Marathon Bombing using
restorative rhetoric (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010) as a theoretical framework.
Literature Review
While no two crises are the same, scholars identified three common elements:
surprise, threat, and short response time (Hermann, 1963). Looking to past examples such as the Oklahoma City Bombing, Anthrax scare, and 9/11, we see that
surprise, threat, and fear all lend to the impactful nature of terrorism, which poses
risk to not only people but to property and the natural world (Slovic, 2002).
Defining characteristics of terrorism include intentionality, vulnerability, and psychological impact (Goldstein, 2005). Despite low levels of attacks in the United
States compared to other nations (Lee, Lemyre, & Krewski, 2010), the threat of
terrorism is still seen as uncontrollable and is associated with high levels of fear
(Shepard, 2011).
Because of the nature of terrorist attacks, a need exists for a sophisticated
understanding of how officials should respond to such episodes. Previous research
highlights the importance of leadership in the aftermath of crisis events (Burton,
Kates, & White, 1978; Mileti, 1980). Crisis leaders should engage in a variety of
tasks as part of crisis management and recovery, including being visible, accessible
to the media, and open and honest with stakeholders (Ulmer et al., 2011; Veil &
Ojeda, 2010). In response to crises, leaders should also engage in rhetorical acts to
Restorative Rhetoric 387
express sympathy to victims, to frame the meaning of the event, and to facilitate
renewal (Reierson, Sellnow, & Ulmer, 2009; Seeger, Sellnow, & Ulmer, 2003).
Crisis Communication Theories
Seeger (2006) stresses the importance of distinguishing between various crises and
disasters because the type of event influences the best response for effective communication. For instance, in response to an oil spill, an organization might need to
engage in public relations strategies, such as image repair (Benoit, 1997) or apologetic
discourse (Hearit, 1995). The communication strategy used by organizations and
individuals in response to a crisis can be characterized as rhetoric, defined as “the
human effort to induce cooperation through the use of symbols” (Brock, Scott, &
Chesebro, 1990, p. 14). For the purpose of this article, it is pertinent to distinguish that
the rhetorical function of an organization’s response to a corporate mishap will differ
drastically from an organization’s or individual’s response to terrorism.
Early theories of crisis communication focused on salvaging and repairing an
individual or organization’s reputation. The theory of apologia attempts to better
understand the verbal act of self-defense (Ware & Linkugel, 1973) while image-repair
theory (Benoit, 1997) entails implementing strategies to mend an image or reputation
following a crisis. Situational crisis communication theory (Coombs, 1999) provides a
prescriptive system for matching crisis-response strategies to the crisis situation, taking
into account the ways in which individuals attribute blame or responsibility for the
crisis. Discourse of renewal (Seeger & Ulmer, 2002) moves beyond image restoration
and repair to observe the opportunities for improvement after organizational crises by
learning from the event, invoking ethical communication, and establishing a prospective
vision (Seeger, Ulmer, Novak, & Sellnow, 2005). Although the above frameworks have
evolved over the years, most focus extensively on crisis-management strategies or
postcrisis discourse from the perspective of one individual or organization. Noting
this gap in the literature, scholars introduced restorative rhetoric.
Restorative Rhetoric
As an extension of discourse of renewal, restorative rhetoric moves from “reducing the
offensiveness of an occurrence and maintaining a positive image” but “recognizes there
is a wider public/audience that is traumatized and therefore, must be included in the
response dialogue” (Seeger & Griffin-Padgett, 2010, p. 133). Adopting this wider stance,
the discourse employed by leaders should promote an understanding of the event and
foster community rebuilding. Community leaders must engage in a response that
combines strategic communication that helps mitigate risk and restore public safety
while infusing more humanistic communication, focusing on “the substantive issues of
repair, recover, rebuilding, and helping victims to make sense of what has occurred and
to envision a new reality” (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010, p. 380).
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According to Griffin-Padgett and Allison (2010), restorative rhetoric focuses on
forming an open dialogue containing humanistic communication that engages victims
and others who are physically and emotionally affected to facilitate coping. This form
of communication “involves a more generative and spontaneous dialogue that is
shaped not just in response to the crisis itself, but by contextual and social dimensions
that layer the crisis event and influence the postcrisis response” (p. 380). A leader as
rhetorician does not engage in defensive communication but aids the public’s healing
process. To this end, restorative rhetoric outlines four goals (Griffin-Padgett &
Allison, 2010). The first goal is to restore faith in a system by reconnecting the
community with a core set of values and beliefs. Second, the leader should help crisis
victims and other witnesses begin in the healing process. Third, leaders should create a
sense of security during the resolution of the crisis. Fourth, leaders should establish a
vision for the future. These various rhetorical functions mirror stages that are similar
to phases of crisis management, including the following: initial reaction; crisis assessment; issues of blame; healing and forgiveness; and corrective action and rebuilding
(Griffin & Allison, 2007).
Previous research utilizing the theory has been able to depict these nuances in
response to a terrorist attack. Griffin-Padgett and Allison (2010) used restorative
rhetoric to analyze New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s response to the 9/11
terrorist attacks. They propose that Giuliani’s ability to express his understanding of
the public’s concerns permitted him to emerge as a “rhetorical hero” (p. 382). In this
context, a “rhetor-as-hero” understands that the crisis heightens anxiety among
individuals and can help facilitate sense-making of the dismay and turmoil in the
aftermath (Hyde, 2005). By remaining composed, yet sympathetic, and delivering
speeches focused on healing, forgiveness, freedom, and diversity, Giuliani’s response
to the attacks exemplified restorative rhetoric as he moved beyond relaying information and engaged in humanistic communication that initiated restoration. He also
successfully navigated the strategic roles of crisis leadership, such as remaining
accessible to the media. Thus, his leadership role functioned well in the analysis of
Griffin-Padgett and Allison. However, Giuliani’s communication channels were confined to traditional media such as television or radio as social media had not yet been
introduced to the media landscape.
Social Media
Given the popularity of social media, leaders now must also engage the public via new
communication channels (Ramirez, Dimmick, Feaster, & Lin, 2008; Veil et al., 2011). Over
70% of online adults use social media platforms (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, &
Madden, 2015), which can provide and distribute quick and effective communication. As
crises require quick and effective responses (Ulmer et al., 2011), social media is an important
resource for disseminating information in response to a crisis. It can also serve as a forum to
share information about survivors, volunteer opportunities, and donations (Hughes, Palen,
Sutton, Liu, & Vieweg, 2007; Palen & Liu, 2007).
Restorative Rhetoric 389
Understanding how people communicate via social media in response to crises is
beneficial for government officials and practitioners to increase its effectiveness (Oh,
Agrawal, & Rao, 2013). Recent research on the public’s use of Twitter in the aftermath
of a terrorism event indicates such crises draw widespread attention online (Cheong &
Lee, 2011). Sutton et al. (2014) found that tweets from public officials responding to
the Boston Marathon Bombing were quickly and accurately disseminated. Moreover,
their findings demonstrate that tweets disseminated by these officials are amplified by
social media users, who re-tweet and share the information, at key points in the
response. Others suggest that social media can also be used as a support mechanism
among groups during terrorism (MacGeorge, Samter, Feng, Gillihan, & Graves, 2007).
In order to understand how social media is utilized by public officials in response
to a terrorism event, further research is needed. To address this gap, the current study
draws upon restorative rhetoric as a framework to analyze a leader’s messages during
a crisis. This framework provides a nuanced approach to explore how Boston Mayor
Thomas Menino responded to the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing on social media.
The Boston Marathon Bombing
On April 15, 2013 tragedy struck Boston, Massachusetts. The annual Boston Marathon
was underway when two bombs were detonated near the finish line approximately
12 seconds, and 100 yards apart. These bombs killed three people, injured 264 individuals, and stunned citizens around the world (Global Terrorism Database, 2014). The
assailants of the attack were Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, brothers who immigrated to the United States from Russia. On April 18, after the attack at the Boston
Marathon, these brothers killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police
officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the manhunt proceeded, the brothers
attempted to flee the greater Boston area. On April 19, the brothers were involved
with a shootout with the police that resulted in the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. His
brother, Dzhokhar, was eventually arrested that evening when he was found hiding in a
local resident’s boat in Watertown, Massachusetts (Global Terrorism Database, 2014).
Restorative rhetoric states that Mayor Menino’s messages should provide functional information while simultaneously engaging in humanistic dialogue with those
impacted by the event (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010). To understand this process
and the implementation of restorative rhetoric, we ask the following:
RQ1: How did Mayor Menino utilize social media in response to the Boston
Marathon Bombing?
RQ2: How does Mayor Menino’s response via social media extend our current
understanding of restorative rhetoric?
Method
This study uses a case-study method to analyze Mayor Menino’s tweets following
the Boston Marathon Bombing (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010). Case studies are
often used in research to answer “how” questions (Yin, 2003) as the approach
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G. A. Williams et al.
permits the researcher to “explore, describe, or explain the dynamics of the situation” (Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield, 2009, p. 53). Case studies generate
understanding and permit comparison of responses of certain leaders during terrorism events (Yin, 2003). Using tweets from Menino’s official Twitter account, this
study applies thematic textual analysis to identify significant themes as outlined by
the theory of restorative rhetoric (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010).
Sample
Tweets from Menino’s official Twitter account (@mayortommenino) were collected
from the day of the Boston Marathon Bombing on March 15, 2013 through
Menino’s last tweet about the terrorism attack on September 13, 2013. Collection
resulted in 387 tweets; after removing tweets that did not reference the Boston
Marathon Bombing, 94 tweets remained for analysis. Twitter was chosen as the
channel for this study because it provides short messages that can be quickly
disseminated to the public by the mayor. Twitter is a social media platform that
allows people to converse with other individuals, groups, and the world in general
(Boyd, Golder, & Lotan, 2010), and the messages sent, called tweets, are freely
accessible to the public. Members of the Twitter community can also choose to
craft an original message with their own content or re-tweet another person’s
message.
Analysis
First, we created a timeline of events that occurred during the crisis using various
national news organizations to contextualize the tweets (see Table 1). Next, we
employed thematic analysis to examine each tweet’s message. Thematic analysis
focuses on “identifying and describing both implicit and explicit ideas within the
data” or themes (Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012, p. 20). Each tweet was categorized in accordance with the stage of the crisis. The analysis followed the five stages of
restorative rhetoric including the following: initial reaction; assessment of the crisis;
issues of blame; healing and forgiveness; and corrective action and rebuilding through
rhetorical vision (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010).
Next, each tweet was analyzed to determine if it fulfilled a humanistic and/or
strategic communication function. Tweets containing humanistic communication
focus on “the substantive issues of repair, recover, rebuilding, and helping victims to
make sense of what has occurred and to envision a new reality” (Griffin-Padgett &
Allison, 2010, p. 380). An example of a tweet containing humanistic communication is
“I have never loved it and its people more than I do today. We have never loved it and
its people more than we do today. #OneBoston.” Comparatively, tweets containing
strategic communication include “functions like initiating a crisis response, managing
the flow of information, coordinating actions among first responders, and remaining
accessible to the media” (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010, p. 379). An example of a tweet
Restorative Rhetoric 391
Table 1 Boston Marathon Bombing Timeline of Events
Date and Time
Monday April 15
9:00 a.m.
2:49 p.m.
3:28 p.m.
3:37 p.m.
8:39 p.m.
Tuesday April 16
11:00 p.m.
Thursday April 18
5:20 p.m.
10:31 p.m.
Friday April 19
12:19 a.m.
12:44 a.m.
12:49 a.m.
1:06 a.m.
5:45 a.m.
6:03 p.m.
6:42 p.m.
8:41 p.m.
Event
Boston Marathon begins.
First bomb detonates. Second bomb detonates 13 seconds late.
All remaining marathon runners are stopped on course.
Last critical patient transported from scene.
Castle is opened as an assistance center for runners.
Castle closes.
FBI releases photos of suspects.
MIT police officer Sean Collier is fatally shot.
Cambridge PD responds to carjacking on Memorial Drive.
Firefight between Watertown police and two suspects begin.
Second suspect flees the scene.
First suspect is pronounced dead at hospital.
System-wide transit shutdown and shelter-in-place request is announced.
Shelter-in-place request is lifted.
Watertown resident reports that an individual is hiding in his bout.
Second suspect is taken into custody.
comprised of strategic communication is “Park Plaza Castle has been established as a
resource & information center.” These two types of messages were analyzed to identify
secondary themes in accordance with the event and theory; the purpose of this
secondary analysis was to specify the specific rhetorical functions of each tweet.
Findings
Initial Reaction
Mayor Menino first tweeted three hours after the explosion at the marathon before
following up with two more tweets later in the day for a total of four tweets in his initial
reaction. None of these tweets were original content, but all four were re-tweets of the
@NotifyBoston account. From a leadership perspective, this retransmission could be seen
as the management of information (Ulmer et al., 2011). Although his account was not the
one crafting the original message, the social media platform allowed Menino to rapidly
share information from other accounts that he deemed as important for the public,
focusing on strategic rather than humanistic communication.
Four different types of messages (response management, crisis confirmation, family
resources, and public as resource) were transmitted during Mayor Menino’s initial
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reaction to the event. The first message, “RT @ NotfiyBoston: Please avoid area of
Copley Square to allow first responders to work” depicts how he fulfilled his role as
the coordinator while managing the response. He encouraged the public to avoid the
area of the attack while simultaneously providing the justification of “first responders.” In a time of crisis, leaders must communicate in ways that can improve
conditions for our first responders (Smith, 2008).
Just seconds after the first tweet, Menino sent a second message to inform the
public that an event occurred. This message was the first online confirmation of the
event by Menino when he tweeted “Boston police confirming explosion at marathon
finish line with injuries.” This tweet fulfilled various goals of reducing uncertainty
about what occurred but without humanistic qualities (Griffin-Padgett & Allison,
2010). Although this message falls within the scope of initial reaction, it could also
be seen as the first assessment of the crisis. When Menino stated “with injuries”
without any follow-up statement containing emotional qualities of humanistic communication, the message goes against restorative rhetoric. Furthermore, unlike in the
case of Mayor Giuliani, there was not a time lapse between the first messages of initial
reaction and early assessment of the crisis via Twitter, messages fulfilling both of these
properties occurred at 5:50 p.m. The next two tweets sent by Menino at 8:30 p.m.
focused on resources for the families with missing or possibly injured members,
reaching out to those impacted by the event. In this event, it is unique to see how
the public was used as a resource. That evening, and in the following days, many
messages asked for the public to assist in the investigation.
Assessment of the Crisis
Rather than trying to restore a sense of security and safety after the event (Griffin-Padgett
& Allison, 2010), communication via social media embraced the community as a resource
to restore security to the Boston area while the event was still ongoing. This call for public
engagement was seen many times in tweets such as “Please RT: Call 1–800-CALL-FBI, No
tip too small.” By embracing the public’s assistance in the investigation with any tips or
photos, Menino undertook the critical step of accepting the uncertainty of the crisis event
(Seeger, 2006).
During the assessment of the crisis, Menino’s tweets developed humanistic qualities,
coinciding with his transition from re-tweeting other accounts to generating messages
with his own original content. On April 16, just 24 hours after the bomb exploded, he
tweeted, “We are a strong city. We will pull together as neighbors.” In the following
24 hours, many similar tweets were transmitted, such as “We are Boston. We are one
community. We will not let terror win. #OneBoston.” Such messages reinforced the
belief of unity and resilience.
During crises, messages should facilitate a sense of a united community (Sellnow &
Seeger, 2013). Menino was effective at tweeting messages reinforcing the belief that neighbors and the community at large were united in their resistance to being terrorized. Menino
frequently used “we” in his tweets to demonstrate his unity and solidarity with the citizens of
Restorative Rhetoric 393
Boston. Inclusive language lends to the creation of a “shared sense of identity” and serves as
an inspirational symbol in the management of the crisis (Gardner, 1996, p. 224). The use of
“we” language in this sense seems to be a reoccurrence to the type of language used by Mayor
Giuliani. Although Mayor Giuliani mainly began to use “we” language when discussing
issues of blame by stating “we can live through this” (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010), this
differentiation between the use of “we” language may be due to the drastic differences
between these two events. Yet, regardless of the difference in how these types of messages
were used, they both represent a shared sense of identity.
This shared sense of identity can be seen beyond the use of “we” language in
Menino’s tweets as he also incorporated other “symbols of unity” that are
specific to social media platforms, such as Twitter. The majority of messages
that were sent included the hashtag #OneBoston, while some included #BostonStrong. Lin’s (2014) analysis of Twitter hashtags (#bostonstrong and #prayforboston) demonstrated massive amplification of tweets containing the hashtags by
Twitter users geographically located near Boston. These symbols not only reinforce a sense of shared identity but also depict a sense of resilience, serving as
strong symbols created by the leaders to help frame the meaning of the event
(Seeger et al., 2003). Furthermore, these messages depict a sense of restoration of
core values and a united Boston community (Seeger & Griffin-Padgett, 2010).
Restorative rhetoric posits that Menino, as a rhetorician, should engage in
communication that facilitates coping (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010). This
objective was primarily achieved through statements such as “this is Boston, a
city with courage, compassion and strength that knows no bounds. #OneBoston.”
These types of messages encouraged citizens to be strong in this time of need.
Furthermore, these messages expressed empathy to one’s fellow citizens with
messages such as “I have met with family members and victims, and my heart
is broken #OneBoston.” For the people within the community directly impacted
by this event, Menino provided communication that sought to help these victims
with counseling services, including relaying hotline information. According to
restorative rhetoric, this action moves the healing process from disaster to
restoration (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010). In the initial assessment, he communicated to the public ways to talk with a counselor that is imperative for the
emotional and psychological health of Boston citizens. Research on the 9/11
attacks found that many people ended up suffering from posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) because of the event (Ahern, Galea, Resnick, & Vlahov, 2004).
It is important that Menino communicated with individuals who were personally impacted by the event, as well as those who experienced an indirect
impact. A key component of restorative rhetoric is recognizing the “wider
audience” that must be addressed in the response (Seeger & Griffin-Padgett,
2010). Using social media as a means to engage in dialogue, Menino was able
to share messages that address victims while simultaneously broadcasting them
to members of his online social network, no matter their physical location.
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Issues of Blame
On April 18, the city of Boston went into lockdown, and citizens were asked to stay home
as the investigation proceeded (Botelho, 2013). On April 19, the mayor sent out the
message “all city of Boston: Please stay indoors until further notice,” providing the public
with self-efficacy about how they should respond to the event (Seeger, 2006) by providing
actionable behaviors (Sellnow, Ulmer, Seeger, & Littlefield, 2009). A few hours after
Menino sent a tweet regarding the lockdown, he sent another tweet that depicted the
issue of blame: “#Wanted: Updated photo of 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev released.
Suspect armed & Dangerous.” This is the first time he utilized Twitter to identify the
terrorist. This communication provided the public with a profile picture, which may help
individuals cope by offering a symbol to help them channel their emotions (Nabi, 2002).
As the lockdown continued, Menino consistently heeded the citizens of Boston to
stay indoors and safe as a shootout waged in Watertown, Massachusetts, where
officials eventually apprehended the terrorist (Botelho, 2013). Following this event,
the Mayor tweeted “We got him #OneBoston.” This tweet was Menino’s most retweeted message during the event and was followed by tweets focusing on teamwork,
gratitude, and pride. Following these messages, communication shifted from resilience
and lockdown to healing and rebuilding.
Healing and Forgiveness
The turn in communication by Menino began on April 20 and lasted until May 6. After
the crisis reached a resolution with the capture of one terrorist and the death of the other,
communication began to foster community rebuilding (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010),
symbolized by the tweet “Friday, we felt a sigh of relief as @boston_police reported to the
world, We got him. Today, it is time for us to move our city forward.” Now that the event
was over, Menino took on the key role of a leader by facilitating the renewal and
rebuilding of the community (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010; Reierson et al., 2009).
This reconstruction took shape in what Menino called a “five-phase plan,” which
included various aspects, including environmental testing, building assessment, debris
removal, and utility restoration (Botelho, 2013). He promoted and informed the community about this plan while engaging in communication that depicted healing in
tweets such as “Our healing continues. The FBI has turned over Boylston St, allowing
us to begin our 5-phase plan. #OneBoston.” Similar to messages seen in the initial
response to the terrorist attack, Menino communicated about “our healing,” emphasizing a shared identity. Furthermore, this communication symbolizes that it is not just
those directly affected by the attack but encompasses a wider audience progressing
through the healing and forgiveness process together.
At times, the mayor also acted as the collective voice for the community. For instance,
in response to all of the assistance Boston had received, Menino tweeted “Thank you for
many messages of love & hope over the past few weeks.” This statement could be the
depiction of thanks for those who supported the community while they grieved their
injured and lost loved ones before transitioning into corrective action and rebuilding.
Restorative Rhetoric 395
Corrective Action and Rebuilding
Part of the healing and forgiveness process was to look to the future and to start
rebuilding (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010). To assist those in need of financial
assistance during the recovery, Menino centered his communication on the One
Fund Boston. Initiated on April 16 at the direction of Menino and Massachusetts
Governor Deval Patrick, the One Fund Boston aimed to help those most affected
by the Boston Marathon Bombing (The One Fund, 2013). The goal of his
communication was to convey thanks and to champion the fund with Tweets
such as “I’m proud to announce @onefundboston has now reached $20 million.
$5 million was generated by your clicks along. #oneboston.” This tweet depicted
that, although the One Fund Boston was an important philanthropy initiative,
the Boston public were the “real ones” of whom to be proud. The community
support was strong for this fund, generating donations of $61 million (The One
Fund, 2013), aiding a critical initiative to help those impacted by the bombing to
start rebuilding their lives and communities.
This rebuilding process also sought to help those businesses who were
impacted to begin rebuilding and to get back to work. Various organizations
and banks also assisted those impacted, as seen through tweets such as “thank
you @CitizensBank for stepping forward to assist impacted businesses. Reps onsite all week #OneBoston.” The mayor put emphasis on making sure that these
business owners were aware that he supported their rebuilding by stating “We’ll
be opening our mobile @cityhalltogo truck closer to the area for business to
obtain more convenient access to our resources.” One of the core values depicted
was to get Boylston Street back to its initial state, which would be the completion
of the community rebuilding. This goal was accomplished on April 24 when
Menino tweeted “Boylston street is open. #BostonStrong.”
A Return to Normalcy
Menino continued to exclusively tweet about the city and its response to the
terrorist attack until April 29. At this point in time, his first messages that were
not exclusively about the event began to emerge with tweets such as “@BostonElections is gearing up for tomorrows 2013 Special State Primary.” Following
this tweet, he continued to communicate about the terrorism event and rebuilding until May 7, 2013. Beginning on May 8, content shifted to information about
the recovery and daily activities in the community. This change is drastically
different than the narratives put forward by Mayor Giuliani’s years of response
to the 9/11 attacks (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010) and embodies recovery and
return to normalcy. Thus, this narrative shift could be seen as Menino feeling
that he has restored faith in the system by reconnecting the public with a core set
of values and beliefs, and that those who were affected by the crisis were taken
care of (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010).
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Discussion
This case study illustrates how Mayor Thomas Menino utilized social media as a
channel to communicate various management and leadership roles such as facilitating
coping, understanding, and the healing process while simultaneously fostering community resilience, rebuilding, and restoring public safety. The first tweets relied on strategic
communication rather than humanistic communication as Menino re-tweeted other
accounts, broadcasting messages that told the public what actions to take or avoid.
Although these first tweets did not express remorse, empathy, or sympathy, they did
fulfill the purpose of providing crucial information about the events (Fraustino, Liu, &
Jin, 2012). While the provision of information to aid in coping is important, a communicator’s first response should be to supply instructing information by telling
individuals what they should do to protect themselves (Sellnow et al., 2009). Social
media aided in this task by rapidly disseminating information to a wide audience
through hotlines, Web sites, and other forms of communication. Social media offers a
distinct advantage over traditional media in that those who receive the message, and
want to recall it, can simply pull up the application on their cellular device to review the
message.
After the initial phase, Menino shifted his response to encompass humanistic communication, leading the charge to build resiliency and to facilitate renewal. Resilience
complements restorative rhetoric’s goals to facilitate healing and to establish a vision
(Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010). Following a crisis, resilience can be seen in the
“resources used and adaptive strategies enacted to cope or ‘get through’ the chronic,
ongoing process of clean up and recovery in the aftermath of an event” (Veil & Bishop,
2014, p. 723). More resilient systems are able to “bounce back” and reach a sense of
normalcy more quickly, even when facing more disruptive events. By examining
Menino’s use of humanistic communication, this case study demonstrates how social
media can aid in building community resilience.
Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (2008) identified a set of adaptive
capacities, which serve as a foundation for a community’s preparedness, response, and
recovery to an event. Menino’s use of social media addressed two of these capacities, social
capital and information and communication. Social capital includes maintaining and
sustaining community health by building social support, social participation, and social
bonds as the ability to connect with others to share experiences (Norris et al., 2008). Through
his invocation of humanistic language, Menino used inclusive language such as “we” and
“our” to develop a “shared identity” with the community. Further, Rogers, Burnside-Lawry,
Dragisic, and Mills (2015) suggest resilience should be “a participatory process for passing
power and responsibility for action to citizens” (p. 79). From the onset, Menino embraced
the community as a resource by providing opportunities for individuals to participate in the
response and recovery process. He sent several tweets calling for the public to be the
“eyes-and-ears” of the officials and shared opportunities for offline support by providing
contact information for the 24-hour Mayor’s Health Line and opportunities to donate.
Next, information and communication are vital to establishing resilience (Norris
et al., 2008). As shown, Menino used Twitter to disseminate accurate and timely
Restorative Rhetoric 397
information to audiences. Such information not only protects individuals but promotes a quicker response and subsequent recovery whereas misinformation intensifies
a crisis. Further, Menino also retweeted trusted, local sources of information, such as
the city of Boston’s Office of Emergency Management, to which publics are more
likely to adhere during a crisis (Norris et al., 2008). Finally, he constructed an overarching narrative using the stages of restorative rhetoric, beginning with an overview
of the crisis (initial reaction) and concluding with a return to a new sense of normalcy
(rebuilding). Language, which may take the form of narratives, is influential in
shaping perceptions of an event (Denton, 2004). According to Norris et al. (2008),
such accounts “give the experience shared meaning and purpose” that “in turn affect
resilience” (p. 140). Thus, restorative rhetoric may not only help a community
embrace renewal but also become stronger and more adaptable throughout the life
of the crisis.
Language also plays a powerful role through the process of labeling, a duty given to
political leaders following acts of terror (Denton, 2004). In addition to facilitating
sense-making (Bruscella, 2015), Tuman (2010) argues that labels “create possibilities
for empowering people, causes, issues, and movements or taking power away from the
same” (p. 47). Denton (2004) adds, “Key phrases or symbols also create expectations
of action, solutions, and visions of the future” (p. 14). On social media, labels may take
the form of hashtags. Throughout his narrative, Menino included #OneBoston and
#BostonStrong. By incorporating these hashtags into nearly every tweet, Menino
invoked them as “symbols of unity,” whereby they constructed a shared identity,
represented the meaning of the event and gave the community something to embrace,
to rally behind and to use to interpret and remember the attack.
Although community resilience is often applied in terms of geographic proximity,
this process can also be seen within social groups through “linked lives,” a term used
to denote individuals who are connected to others based on shared life experiences
(Lucas & Buzzanell, 2012, p. 192). Terrorism is a unique crisis. Although the physical
damage may be localized to geographic area, the effects of terrorism radiate throughout the larger culture. Largely in part to the reach of mediated channels, communities
are no longer confined within physical boundaries (Pfefferbaum, Reissman, Pfefferbuam, Klomp, & Gurwitch, 2007), and individuals across the nation watched in
horror as events such as the 9/11 attacks and the Boston Marathon Bombing
unfolded, evoking emotions such as fear and anger. With communication technology,
including social media, communicators can disseminate messages containing instructing and coping information to individuals directly and indirectly impacted by a crisis
(Granatt, 2004). While many of Menino’s tweets focused on the Boston area, several
of his messages embraced this larger community, from providing updates on the
attack and subsequent manhunt to expressing gratitude “for the outpouring of concern” and offering information on how to assist victims. Menino’s tweet proclaiming
“We got him” during the resolution of the crisis arguably created not only a sense of
security for Bostonians (Griffin-Padgett & Allison, 2010) but for many Americans.
As this analysis of Menino’s tweets following the Boston Marathon Bombing
demonstrates, a leader’s adoption of restorative rhetoric following a crisis enables
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him or her to guide audiences through the sense-making process, ultimately shifting
the focus to corrective action and rebuilding. This goal corresponds with resilience
and the larger theoretical framework of renewal discourse, which also emphasize
growth and transformation (Norris et al., 2008; Seeger & Ulmer, 2002). This process
will likely not result in a restoration to the precrisis state but rather a new sense of
normalcy. This case study also shows the role social media may play during these
processes. In addition to disseminating information (Fraustino et al., 2012), social
media also aids in the provision of emotional support, helping individuals establish a
sense of community and cope with an event (Vicary & Fraley, 2010).
Although restorative rhetoric provided an effective framework to analyze the current
study, some aspects of this young theory need further refinement. At the onset of this
analysis, the authors struggled to distinguish the nuances of the final two stages of
healing and forgiveness and corrective action and rebuilding. Upon completion of
analysis, no messages pertained to forgiveness. For this study, the forgiveness stage
could be reconceptualized as merely “healing” or, more generally, as transcendence.
Unlike apologia’s transcendence (Hearit, 1995), Menino’s tweets served to change the
dialogue and move the victims and community away from the particulars of the crisis
event, rather than the rhetorical leader. Findings suggest following certain crisis events,
such as terrorist attacks, messages may never reach the forgiveness stage. In addition to
terrorism, natural disasters may also function to restore without the passing through the
forgiveness stage. Further studies should seek to explore and fully distinguish the
forgiveness communication that occurs in accordance with restorative rhetoric.
In all five phases of analysis, Mayor Menino’s communication changed. There was
a turn in dialogue from information dissemination to focusing on resilience and
coping. However, the findings from this study suggest that leaders may not always
move through the stages of restorative rhetoric sequentially. Rather, the phases may
overlap as individuals share information about the damage while also initiating
healing. In one instance, Menino interposed the tweet, “We are a strong city. We
will pull together as neighbors,” between tweets sharing the location of a resource
center. Thus, the immediate nature of social media permits communicators to not
only quickly post messages but also to shift between the themes of restorative rhetoric
without affecting the ultimate goal. Moreover, this particular case not only included
the initial act of terrorism but a subsequent 4-day manhunt and capture. This second
event also altered Menino’s communication and the phases of restorative rhetoric as
tweet content changed when the terrorists were captured, allowing Boston to begin to
look forward. In sum, each stage created a dialogue shift until May 6, when Menino
last tweeted about the attack, symbolizing a return to a sense of normalcy.
Based on our findings, we propose a few areas of future research. First, the application
of restorative rhetoric may vary depending on the specific crisis event. Thus, further
clarification of the theory would be very beneficial for future applications and theory
development, including examining how communicators balance strategic and humanistic
communication. Second, our data suggest that the use of hashtags as symbols of resilience
are very important, but there is a lack of evidence about how the public perceives these
symbols while a crisis is ongoing. Third, the re-tweeting of other accounts in the initial
Restorative Rhetoric 399
reaction phase by Menino raises various questions about the importance of the source of
the message disseminated on social media, including how the public perceives messages
that are re-tweeted versus original content. The final area of potential research should
explore the potential two-way communication that social media platforms present. More
specifically, there is a need to address the ways in which public officials can effectively and
rapidly assess the potential influx of information when leaders embrace, or request, the
community to be the “eyes and ears” of the response.
Conclusion
This analysis of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s communication on social media in
the aftermath of a terrorism event provided additional insight into terrorism communication and restorative rhetoric. While Menino serves as an exemplar of effective
communication following a terrorist attack, room exists for improvement. Working to
reduce the lull and absence of tweets at the onset of the crisis is one way to better
public response. Although key figures are often needed in other facets outside of social
media during a crisis, public officials and emergency managers should consider
allocating resources to ensure social media presence following the onset of crisis.
When communicating in the aftermath of a terrorism event, this study implores that
officials use both humanistic and strategic communication (Griffin-Padgett & Allison,
2010; Seeger & Griffin-Padgett, 2010). Moreover, officials using social media should coin
hashtags that produce a sense of unity or be an early adopter of these symbols in their
communication, allowing them to promote hope and a vision, planning the seeds for
renewal early on. Restorative rhetoric promises to be a useful lens through which to view
how leaders communicate following a crisis, to not only provide strategic and humanistic
communication but also foster resilience. Finally, this analysis illustrates how leaders can,
and should, incorporate social media to achieve these goals as affected communities are
no longer defined by geographic boundaries.
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