Public Ethos in the Pandemic Rhetorical Situation: Strategies for Building Trust in Authorities' Risk Communication (original) (raw)
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Navigating pandemic phases: Public health authority communication during COVID-19 in Norway
NORDICOM, 2024
During a pandemic, the advice issued by public health authorities undergoes significant scrutiny, potentially affecting public adherence to recommended measures. Trust and trustworthiness become key. This book analyses the rhetorical strategies of the Norwegian public health authorities as the COVID-19 pandemic moved through phases that presented different rhetorical problems and challenges. Many consider the Norwegian response successful, making it a particularly interesting case. Adopting an organisation-focused viewpoint, the analysis examines communication strategies through a dataset collected as the pandemic evolved. This included observations within communication departments of the main public health agencies during March and April 2020. The study offers five key insights: 1) A pandemic rhetorical situation has changing constraints and opportunities that influence the agency of the rhetor and necessitates bottom-up, continuing situational analysis and attention to perceptions; 2) The notion of “the rhetorical situation” conceptualises different phases that “bleed” into each other; 3) Trust and trustworthiness are negotiated through specific rhetorical strategies; 4) Transparency is the most crucial strategy; 5) Authorities used a combination of invitational rhetoric, providing a role for the citizens to willingly contribute to curbing the virus, and imperative form through simple directives that citizens were expected to follow.
Ethos in COVID-19 crisis communication: evidence from Oman
Journal of Risk Research, 2023
There is little research on the effectiveness of the rhetorical strategies adopted by governments in COVID-19 crisis communication. This study aimed to answer the following two questions: (1) What are the ethos-related rhetorical strategies used in the official Arabic discourse of COVID-19 crisis communication in Oman? (2) Aligned with Seeger's model of best practice in crisis communication, to what extent are these ethos-related rhetorical strategies effective in delivering a successful crisis response communication? The data came from Oman's COVID-19 Supreme Committee press conference. The data included the first six press conferences covering the period from April 2, 2020 to May 7, 2020. The study showed that Oman's COVID-19 crisis communication exhibits a variety of ethos-related rhetorical strategies, mainly to establish, reinforce and restore speaker's credibility. The study also showed that Oman's COVID-19 crisis communication was effective from a rhetorical perspective because it made use of rhetorical strategies that aligned well with Seeger's best practice of honesty, candor and openness. One of the key recommendations of this paper is to call for Seeger's model to be expanded to cover areas that this model does not currently address, namely speaker's competence and message believability.
Strategies in Communicating and Enforcing Covid-19 Measures: A Rhetorical Analysis
Deleted Journal, 2024
The emergence of the COVID-19 virus in late 2019 initiated a global crisis, leading to millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. Governments worldwide implemented various measures to curb the spread of the virus, including lockdowns, social distancing, and hygiene protocols. In response to these measures, leaders employed persuasive language techniques to encourage compliance and reassure citizens. This study explores the linguistic strategies used by four national leaders-Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, and Uhuru Kenyatta-in their speeches addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on the rhetorical strategies employed, including ethos, logos, and pathos, as well as linguistic devices such as metaphors and enumeration. The findings of this study show that leaders strategically utilize persuasive language to convey information, evoke emotions, and inspire collective action. The study underscores the importance of understanding linguistic persuasion in effective communication during crises and highlights the relevance of classical rhetorical strategies in contemporary political discourse.
Book chapter in "Political Discourse and Media in Times of Crisis"- Edited by Sofia Iordanidou Nael Jebril Emmanouil Takas Anthem Global Media and Communication Studies, 2023
Abstract This chapter presents the findings of a cross-national analysis of the discourse of five political leaders (USA, UK, Germany, Greece, New Zealand) during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced in their public statements, announcements and messaging related to the unfolding of epidemic events. Through a discourse analysis of 16 pandemic-related political leaders' texts, this study uncovers how the selected political actors employed discourse as a means to strategically appropriate the critical exigence and as a tool to achieve legitimation and exert persuasive impact on their audiences through speech, arguments, rhetorical, discursive, and meta-discursive elements. The study's results indicate that strategic intentionality and legitimation are integral parts of pandemic-related political discourse. Collected data provide evidence that political rhetoric and discursive tropes were strategically employed by all political leaders in their effort to define the situation, manage the issue, influence public attitudes and policies, establish the core values of the nation and their governance, and ultimately, "construct" and "re-figure" the pandemic reality as experienced at the national level. Despite commonalities, the leaders employed diversified, even antithetical rhetorical and legitimation responses to the public health crisis and appropriated the exigence through different discursive choices and assessments of audience, purpose and message.
Crisis communication and crisis management during COVID-19
Global Discourse, 2021
This paper presents results from a comparative and qualitative discourse-historical analysis of governmental crisis communication in Austria, Germany, France, Hungary and Sweden, during the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown from March 2020 to May 2020 (a ‘discourse strand’). By analysing a sample of important speeches and press conferences by government leaders (all performing as the ‘face of crisis management’), it is possible to deconstruct a range of discursive strategies announcing/legitimising restrictive measures in order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic where everybody is in danger of falling ill, regardless of their status, position, education and so forth. I focus on four frames that have been employed to mitigate the ‘dread of death’ (Bauman, 2006) and counter the ‘denial of death’ (Becker, 1973/2020): a ‘religious frame’, a ‘dialogic frame’, a frame emphasising ‘trust’, and a frame of ‘leading a war’. These interpretation frameworks are all embedded in ‘renationalising’...
2020
RHM Author Interview (Youtube video): Liz Angeli, Ph.D. and Christina Norwood, M.S., authors of Persuasion Brief: The Internal Rhetorical Work of a Public Health Crisis Response This persuasion brief suggests that the rhetorical concepts of techne and rhetorical work facilitate the creation of public health crisis communication. To illustrate this claim, we present findings from a case study with the Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, a transdisciplinary group that collaborated with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola crisis. The team created multimodal documentation to support healthcare providers as they prepared to treat patients and crafted communication to alleviate the fear among health workers and the public caused by the threat of Ebola. Ultimately, we frame public health crisis communication as a rhetorical endeavor guided by a focus on failure, situated expertise, and techne. This focus pushes specialists to tend to the pr...
Crisis Communication during Covid–19
Hadmérnök
Early in 2020, the Covid–19 epidemic started, posing many challenges for civilisation. The pandemic caused a paradigm change in many ways, unavoidably increasing people’s uncertainty and worry about a new global order. Along with stopping the virus, governments aiming to contain the pandemic had to deal appropriately with the infodemic scenario, which supported several pseudo-scientific opinions among substantial numbers of people. The spread of more and more nonsense fake news has eroded the trust in the institutions, which has led to a prolonged phase of the epidemic’s end. It is yet unknown how long the coronavirus epidemic will have an impact on daily life as of the time of writing, in the summer of 2022, more outbreaks have been brought on by mask use and vaccination refusal. Because of this, controlling the crisis and reducing the harm the infodemic creates depends on effective government crisis communication. This essay attempts to illustrate effective crisis communication st...
Frontiers in Public Health
BackgroundEmergency risk communication (ERC) is key to achieving compliance with public health measures during pandemics. Yet, the factors that facilitated ERC during COVID-19 have not been analyzed. We compare ERC in the early stages of the pandemic across four socio-economic settings to identify how risk communication can be improved in public health emergencies (PHE).MethodsTo map and assess the content, process, actors, and context of ERC in Germany, Guinea, Nigeria, and Singapore, we performed a qualitative document review, and thematically analyzed semi-structured key informant interviews with 155 stakeholders involved in ERC at national and sub-national levels. We applied Walt and Gilson's health policy triangle as a framework to structure the results.ResultsWe identified distinct ERC strategies in each of the four countries. Various actors, including governmental leads, experts, and organizations with close contact to the public, collaborated closely to implement ERC str...
2022
Background. Science communication can provide people with more accurate information on pandemic health risks by translating complex scientific topics into language that helps people make more informed choices on how to protect themselves and others. During pandemics, experts in medicine, science, public health, and communication are important sources of knowledge for science communication. This study uses the COVID-19 pandemic to explore these experts opinions and knowledge of what to communicate to the public during a pandemic. The research question is: What are the key topics to communicate to the public about health risks during a pandemic? Method. We purposively sampled 13 experts in medicine, science, public health, and communication for individual interviews, with a range of different types of knowledge of COVID-19 risk and communication at the national, regional and hospital levels in Norway. The interview transcripts were coded and analysed inductively in a qualitative thema...