Consideration of Crises: Crises in Conflict, Crisis Communication History, and Crisis Coping

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, massive shortages of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and other medical devices threatened the safety of frontline healthcare workers and slowed pandemic response, however, four years earlier, in 2016, the EPA announced findings that ethylene oxide (EtO), the nation's most common sterilizing agent for PPE was thirty times more carcinogenic than previously believed. Subsequent studies found increased rates of cancer in the neighborhoods surrounding EtO sterilization facilities. Residents erupted in protest, resulting in the closure of several sterilization facilities over health industry concerns about the risk of PPE shortages. In March 2020, industry concerns were realized as the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the need for massive equipment sterilization. This rhetorical analysis investigates the public relations efforts of government officials as they worked to manage these two conflicting crises. 

Crisis communication in public relations has traditionally followed a corporate-centric and reputation-centric path. This chapter seeks to provide new directions for crisis history by providing two vignettes that (1) compare the corporate and the activist perspectives on a well-known U.S. crisis communication incident (Ludlow Massacre in 1914), and (2) provide an activist public relations lens for understanding the community activism, led by Jane Jacobs, that thwarted a planned Lower Manhattan Expressway (New York City in 1968). These examples demonstrate the efficacy of reexamining historical events as crisis communication in order to expand the scope of who can practice public relations/crisis communication, as well as to more clearly understand that communities and individuals experience crises, not just organizations, and our theories and perspectives on crisis history can do more to reflect this reality. 

The field of social-mediated crisis communication has experienced significant growth over the past decade. However, there remains a lack of consensus regarding the impact of social media crisis information consumption on the coping responses of the public, including the circumstances under which such an impact occurs and the mechanisms through which it operates. To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analysis guided by the social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model, which systematically and quantitatively examined the perceptual, behavioral, and affective coping responses of the public following exposure to social media crisis information.