The Mediating Role of the News in the BP Oil Spill Crisis 2010

The paper explains antecedents and consequences of news during the BP oil spill crisis by analyzing newspaper and internet coverage as well as financial indicators. The study establishes the roles of routines in financial journalism and of BP’s public relations efforts in building the U.S. media agenda. The U.S. media agenda in turn bears a classic agenda-setting effect on public awareness, an intermedia agenda-setting effect on foreign media, and a stakeholder agenda-setting effect on financial markets. A second-level attribute agenda-setting post-hoc study reveals that these first-order agenda setting effects depend on the resonance of specific problems and solutions with specific interests and a specific frame of mind. Financial stakeholders, for example, reacted negatively to news about judicial accountability, but positively to press releases about BP’s skills in implementing solutions. The findings contradict research which states that the news in classic media merely mirrors share prices.

[1]  M. McCombs.  Agenda setting function of mass media , 1977 .

[2]  Damian Tambini.  WHAT ARE FINANCIAL JOURNALISTS FOR? , 2010 .

[3]  C. Roush.  The Markets and the Media: Business News and Stock Market Movements , 2006 .

[4]  E. Fama.  Random Walks in Stock Market Prices , 1965 .

[5]  W. T. Coombs,et al.  Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis: The Development and Application of Situational Crisis Communication Theory , 2007 .

[6]  W. H. van Atteveldt,et al.  Semantic Network Analysis: Techniques for Extracting, Representing, and Querying Media Content , 2008 .

[7]  Kenneth Benoit,et al.  Scaling Policy Positions From Coded Units of Political Texts , 2009 .

[8]  Yi-Hui Huang.  Crisis Situations, Communication Strategies, and Media Coverage , 2006, Commun. Res..

[9]  T. Chang.  The Impact of Presidential Statements on Press Editorials Regarding U.S. China Policy, 1950-1984 , 1989 .

[10]  Jörg Matthes,et al.  Exposure to Counterattitudinal News Coverage and the Timing of Voting Decisions , 2012, Commun. Res..

[11]  Paul C. Tetlock.  Giving Content to Investor Sentiment: The Role of Media in the Stock Market , 2005, The Journal of Finance.

[12]  Framing news on risk industries: Local journalism and conditioning factors , 2010 .

[13]  Guosong Shao,et al.  What Is Most Important for My Country Is Not Most Important for Me , 2012, Commun. Res..

[14]  Itai Himelboim,et al.  Reply distribution in online discussions: A comparative network analysis of political and health newsgroups , 2008, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[15]  Slava J. Mikhaylov,et al.  Scaling policy preferences from coded political texts , 2011 .

[16]  F. E..  Principles of Economics , 1890, Nature.

[17]  Srilata Zaheer,et al.  Wall Street vs. Main Street: Firm Strategies for Defending Legitimacy and Their Impact on Different Stakeholders , 2012, Organ. Sci..

[18]  Tim Loughran,et al.  When is a Liability not a Liability? Textual Analysis, Dictionaries, and 10-Ks , 2010 .

[19]  Yan Jin,et al.  Examining the Role of Social Media in Effective Crisis Management , 2014, Commun. Res..

[20]  Claes H. de Vreese,et al.  (In)direct Framing Effects: The Effects of News Media Framing on Public Support for Turkish Membership in the European Union , 2011, Commun. Res..

[21]  Stefaan Walgrave,et al.  The Contingency of the Mass Media's Political Agenda Setting Power: Toward a Preliminary Theory , 2006 .

[22]  Paul C. Tetlock.  Giving Content to Investor Sentiment: The Role of Media in the Stock Market , 2005, The Journal of Finance.

[23]  Robert M. Entman,et al.  Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm , 1993 .

[24]  Federica Fornaciari,et al.  Semantic Network Analysis , 2016 .

[25]  Spiro K. Kiousis,et al.  Understanding Influence on Corporate Reputation: An Examination of Public Relations Efforts, Media Coverage, Public Opinion, and Financial Performance From an Agenda-Building and Agenda-Setting Perspective , 2007 .

[26]  Matthew W. Seeger,et al.  Communication and Organizational Crisis , 2003 .

[27]  S. Utz,et al.  Social Influence in Networks of Practice: An Analysis of Organizational Communication Content , 2011 .

[28]  Johan Bollen,et al.  Twitter mood predicts the stock market , 2010, J. Comput. Sci..

[29]  Gabriel Weimann,et al.  Agenda Building, Agenda Setting, Priming, Individual Voting Intentions, and the Aggregate Results: An Analysis of Four Israeli Elections , 2005 .

[30]  Stuart Soroka,et al.  The International Two-Step Flow in Foreign News: Canadian and U.S. Television News Coverage of U.S. Affairs , 2010 .

[31]  S. Walgrave,et al.  The Contingency of Intermedia Agenda Setting: A Longitudinal Study in Belgium , 2008 .

[32]  Gerardo Patriotta,et al.  Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies, Orders of Worth, and Public Justifications , 2011 .

[33]  J. Kleinnijenhuis,et al.  News and Advertisements: How Negative News May Reverse Advertising Effects , 2007, Journal of Advertising Research.

[34]  A. Marshall,et al.  Principles of Economics , 1891 .

[35]  Marshall S. Smith,et al.  The general inquirer: A computer approach to content analysis. , 1967 .

[36]  T. Snell,et al.  Synergistic toxicity of Macondo crude oil and dispersant Corexit 9500A(®) to the Brachionus plicatilis species complex (Rotifera). , 2013, Environmental pollution.

[37]  W. F. Harlow,et al.  BP initial image repair strategies after the Deepwater Horizon spill , 2011 .

[38]  Wouter van Atteveldt,et al.  Financial news and market panics in the age of high-frequency sentiment trading algorithms , 2013 .

[39]  Nikolaus Hautsch,et al.  When machines read the news: Using automated text analytics to quantify high frequency news-implied market reactions , 2011 .

[40]  H. Brosius,et al.  Mirror or Molder? A Study of Media Coverage, Stock Prices, and Trading Volumes in Germany , 2011 .

[41]  Joe Bob Hester.  Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion , 2005 .

[42]  Sonja Utz,et al.  Strategic framing in the BP crisis: A semantic network analysis of associative frames , 2012 .

[43]  Roberto Casarin,et al.  Being on the Field When the Game Is Still Under Way. The Financial Press and Stock Markets in Times of Crisis , 2013, PloS one.

[44]  Barbara M. Miller.  Community Stakeholders and Marketplace Advocacy: A Model of Advocacy, Agenda Building, and Industry Approval , 2010 .

[45]  R. Stevenson,et al.  The Conditioned Impact of Recession News: A Time‐Series Analysis of Economic Communication in the United States, 1987–1996 , 2002 .

[46]  Philip J. Stone,et al.  Extracting Information. (Book Reviews: The General Inquirer. A Computer Approach to Content Analysis) , 1967 .

[47]  J. Stiglitz.  The media and the crisis: An information theoretic approach , 2014 .

[48]  Dietram A. Scheufele,et al.  - 1THE STATE OF FRAMING RESEARCH : A CALL FOR NEW DIRECTIONS , 2011 .

[49]  B. Malkiel.  The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Its Critics , 2003 .

[50]  Загоровская Ольга Владимировна,et al.  Исследование влияния пола и психологических характеристик автора на количественные параметры его текста с использованием программы Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count , 2015 .