Writing Samples
- Tuscaloosa Tornado Crisis Communication Response Case Study
Abstract: April 27th, 2011 was a day that changed the landscape of Tuscaloosa, Alabama as well as the lives of thousands of people that call it home. At 5:13 p.m. an EF-4 tornado with winds reaching 190 miles per hour touched down on the southwest outskirts of the city and proceeded to cut a path of destruction that stretched over 80 miles long, measuring a mile and a half wide at its peak. When the storm had passed 65 people, including more than 50 Tuscaloosa residents and 6 University of Alabama students, had been killed, 1,200 had been injured and approximately 12 percent of the city of Tuscaloosa had been destroyed. This case study seeks to explore the City of Tuscaloosa’s crisis response communication strategies as outlined by Coombs (2012) including how officials disseminated information to the public through local news and social media in the aftermath of the storm. This study also explores these strategies in the context of the Tuscaloosa Forward program, which was an economic and community based recovery program approved less than five months after the crisis that symbolically marked the end of the crisis.
- Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood: An agenda Setting Analysis
Abstract: The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, under the leadership of CEO Nancy G. Brinker, announced in late January 2012 that it would be cutting funding to Planned Parenthood that had been used to provide women with free clinical breast exams and mammogram referrals. Although Komen announced that it had made the decision on the basis of policy changes regarding the provision of money to institutions under federal investigation, there was widespread speculation that the decision had been made on political grounds by pro-life advocates within the Komen organizations leadership. Planned Parenthood quickly set out to establish its agenda in the media, successfully utilizing its social media tools and its powerful political network to turn public opinion against Susan G. Komen. Although Komen’s financial contributions made up a small fraction of the billion-dollar budget that Planned Parenthood operated with, the leaders at Planned Parenthood made it their mission to reverse the policy that had been adopted by Komen, reestablish the funding that had been withdrawn and set the agenda for the public conversation in a presidential election year. This paper will explore the agenda setting theory by using Planned Parenthood’s response to Susan G. Komen to outline how one organization turned a insignificant financial loss into a political and public firestorm through traditional media and, to a larger extent, social media.
- Nonverbal Expectancy Violations and Political Appropriateness in Regards to Memorable Moments in Politics
In today’s digital, media driven environment, everything from sports and leisure to politics and world news is driven by visual elements. In addition to having access to endless commentary, viewers at home can watch and re-watch a memorable moment from multiple angles and avenues. In politics, “much of what the public knows about a candidate comes from television appearances in which visual information is prominent,” and, in turn, televised episodes are normally more prominent than modest sound bites. In the political realm, the nature of visual primacy means a memorable moment can change the entire landscape of a political race. As the media have become more central to public affairs, such as presidential elections, political battles are waged largely through the brief excerpts that make their way into the news cycle . Political candidates are given ample opportunities to create these moments in the media through televised speeches at events, luncheons and, in some cases, even their own advertising. Even after a period of time, moments like Bob Dole’s fall from the stage in California, and the Howard Dean yell at the Iowa Caucus leave a lasting impression on minds of viewers and voters alike. These moments are made memorable by their conspicuous nature and their “departure from established norms or local interactional conventions,” and, as a result, quickly become the primary focus of media scrutiny. Gresham’s law of news, that negative information always drives out the positive, applies to politics nicely. “Politicians who behave as law abiding citizens attract little attention,” writes Iyengar, however, “the few who break the law elicit volumes of attention”. Although none of the episodes reviewed in this study involve an incident of the law being broken, the same rule can be applied to politicians who break expectations visually and verbally, both in a positive and negative manner. The nature of memorable moments in politics is that they are candidate and event specific and can occur in a variety of ways. Two prominent themes which occur among memorable episodes, for the purpose of this study, are violations of nonverbal expectations and deviations from political appropriateness. In order to gather detailed and open-ended information regarding these two themes a focus group was gathered and shown five short clips of politicians in a variety of memorable moments. The information gathered from this focus group reveals that politicians are met with a higher standard that, when not met, breaks the audience’s expectations. Furthermore, group sentiment revealed a stark cynicism regarding politics that may be indicative of how the current generation feels about partisan politics today.
