Crisis Communication and the Internet: Risk and Trust in the Global Media

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As an example of the interrelationship between crisis communication and the Internet, this piece examines the case of the September 11 2001 attack on the cities of New York and Washington, when four planes were hijacked, two of them slammed into the towers of the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and the last crashed in a field near Pittsburgh.

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Risk is one of the main features of modern societies. With the Internet a new media has appeared, which on the one hand has increased the risk associated with information: free accessibility, interactivity, globality, and connectivity of personal, economical, political and media communication have all led to a loss of journalistic control over the information market. On the other hand Internet-based communication has increased opportunities to secure information in a manner that has not been available up to now. In terms of crisis communication this leads to the question: does the Internet increase or decrease the risk of a communication breakdown? It has been demonstrated that trust is one of the features in complex modern societies which compensates for risk. So does the Internet increase trust in global crisis communication? The questions concerning the interrelation of risk, trust and crisis communication are seen in a much broader context: does Internet communication force a structural transformation of the public sphere?

How the Internet changes and improves crisis communication:

Decentralization of crisis communication.

Crisis communication becomes multi-directional, more intercultural. If you compare coverage of the Gulf War and recent events in Afghanistan with the coverage of Kosovo war the differences are obvious: the lack of Internet resources in the first two cases was caused by a television-centered crisis communication with a high dependency on military information. In the case of the Kosovo war, there were Internet-based information sources right where the war was occurring, from e-mail to Web sites, all of which reported as private correspondents and eyewitnesses. This multidirectional form of crisis communication allowed the audience to compare and evaluate different sources and to understand better the biases of official information.

Qualification of journalism.

Media communication is supplemented by personal communication personal journalism. See, for example, Smiljana Antonijevic's article on the use of the Internet in Belgrade, as a communications tool and news filter.

Acceleration of crisis communication.

The disembeddedness of Internet communication relative to time means that there is a continuous flow of information; news spreads without temporal boundaries. The network characteristics of the Internet enable distribution to an unlimited audience. For example, only minutes after the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center a message about that event appeared on a newsgroup (slashdot.org) together with a query to the group community for further information. The Internet also accelerated the distribution of several rumours, but also permitted clarification and correction (as in the case of CNN's aforementioned video).

The Internet has become a watch dog of official and journalistic crisis communication.

We have different examples of sites examining the coverage of the crisis between Israel and Palestine. For example, the pro-Israel site HonestReporting define its task as:

"There are many factors that influence our perception of truth. Perspective is one of the most significant: one man's 'terrorist' is another man's 'freedom fighter'. (...) While in the world media there exists bias against both sides, our concern is purely with anti-Israel bias - though we do believe that any bias is ultimately counter-productive for all involved" (From HonestReporting.com)...

The Internet becomes a global archive of crisis communication.

Much of the Kosovo coverage is still archived on the Web; for example, see the Global Policy Forum's Kosovo archives. In case of the September 11th events, Web sites around the world created archives as a kind of virtual memorial for those killed in the event; see for example September11News.com. For research in crisis communication these archives provide unique opportunities to compare different events and cases.

The Internet creates global virtual communities.

These communities are different from those invented by traditional media and political interests. In these communities, individuals expressed their emotions and asked urgent questions often on a highly sophisticated level.

"Because all of America was affected by the events of Sept. 11, the Internet and 24-cable news shows quickly assumed the role of electronic town halls. But if those forms of communication initially brought the country together in displays of public grieving - through broadcasts of memorial services and Web site tributes to the victims - they have more lately become national forums for the expression of anxiety." (From the New York Times of 20 October 2001).

Consequences

The integration of the Internet in crisis communication alters the role of journalism and undermines the power of communication of official sources. What we can state is a loss of information control by journalists and official sources. As Jim Hall draws the consequences from the Kosovo crisis communication: "One of the roles of journalism in this ocean of information is to help readers negotiate the various impasses that arise around bad and contradictory information, even from reputable sources" (Hall, 2000, p. 393). Journalists are no longer only the gatekeepers of information but they must become guides for global information space.

Media which communicates the crisis becomes a factor of the crisis itself. We learned already from the Gulf War coverage that satellite TV can become a factor for the dynamics of the crisis itself - an observation we could make in the September 11th crisis as well. For example when George Bush and Osama bin Laden used television for their messages, this was expected to influence the development of the crisis. But in a deeper sense this became true for the Internet: the terrorists used Internet communication to plan and to coordinate their attacks, made possible by the disembeddedness of the medium and the corresponding lack of communication control.

We have to consider in crisis communication that there are tendencies towards a global public. Satellite TV like CNN or Al Jazeera are the starting points of a global public. But with the Internet this becomes much more apparent. So whoever communicates in a crisis, which is of international relevance, has to be aware of a global audience. Of course one has to take into account that the access to Internet communication is far from a fair distribution in the different regions of the world. But from that, one gets an argument for setting the new world order of information on the public agenda again....

There is an important difference in crisis communication depending on where the crisis happens. If you compare the picture of the exploding South Tower of the World Trade Center to the MSNBC picture of U.S. attacks on Kabul (Figure 3 and 4), the difference is apparent at once. A crisis in the middle of a media society guarantees the full attention of all media causing a completely different dynamic of crisis communication. This relates to for example the quality of the information, the density of the information and also the emotional concern of the audience. So even the chances of crisis communication are very unequal if one compares the media potential in a developed media society with the potential in a undeveloped or developing country....