The Effects of a Press Release and Newspaper Coverage on Perceived Trustworthiness
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Journal of Behavioral Public Administration Vol 1(1), pp. 1-10 DOI: 10.30636/jbpa.11.16 Breaking bad news without breaking trust: The effects of a press release and newspaper coverage on perceived trustworthiness Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen*, Femke de Vries†, Wilte Zijlstra‡ Abstract: Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of “bad news” on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release in- volving bad news about an error committed by an independent regulatory agency in the Netherlands. Two days after the agency’s press release, we carried out a survey experiment to test the effects on public trust of the press release itself as well as related newspaper articles. Results show that the press release had no nega- tive effect on trustworthiness, which may be because the press release “steals thunder” (i.e. breaks the bad news before the news media discovered it) and focuses on a “rebuilding strategy” (i.e. offering apologies and focusing on future improvements). In contrast, the news articles mainly focused on what went wrong, which affected the competence dimension of trust but not the other dimensions (benevolence and integrity). We con- clude that strategic communication by an agency can break negative news to people without necessarily break- ing trust in that agency. And although effects of negative news coverage on trustworthiness were observed, the magnitude of these effects should not be overstated. Keywords: Public trust, News media, Regulation, Strategic communication, Survey experiment any scholars in public administration and Slothuus & De Vreese, 2010) and how crisis com- M communication acknowledge the im- munication affects organizational reputations (e.g. portance of communicating with the public to sus- Coombs, 2007; Arpan & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2005). tain citizen trust and legitimacy (Fairbanks, Plow- But there is scarce empirical research directly inves- man, & Rawlins, 2007; Liu, Horsley, & Blake, 2010; tigating the effect of press releases of public organ- Liu, Horsley, & Yang, 2012; Ruijer, 2013). One core izations, and particularly independent regulatory agencies idea behind proactive communication is that it can (IRAs), on citizen trust. Communication for public be used to counterbalance negative media coverage organizations has some likening with private sector (Graber, 2003; Liu et al., 2012). But are proactive communication, but there are fundamental differ- forms of communication by public organizations ences related to unique government functions such effective for this purpose? as informing the public and raising awareness (Pas- There is an abundance of research on how quier, 2017). In addition, studies in crisis commu- media coverage and framing of political issues af- nication have mostly investigated effects in a fairly fect public opinion (e.g. Chong & Druckman, 2007; controlled setting (e.g. Arpan & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2005; Coombs & Holladay, 2008; Claes, Cau- * Utrecht University School of Governance, The berghe,& Vincke, 2010). In contrast, we take our Netherlands; experiment into the field and study a real-world or- † Department of Constitutional, Administrative law ganization faced with the challenge of communi- and Public Administration, University of Groningen, cating bad news to the public. Finally, empirical The Netherlands; &samhoud consultancy; studies from public administration on the effects of ‡ Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), communication are scarce. Some studies have The Netherlands found positive associations between proactive Address correspondence to Stephan communication and citizen attitudes, but these Grimmelikhuijsen at ([email protected]) studies did not rely on experimental data and thus Copyright: © 2018. The authors license this article have limited causal validity (Liu et al., 2012; Hong, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2016). 4.0 International License. Updated with minor corrections on 5/21/2018 1 Grimmelikhuijsen, De Vries, & Zijlstra, 2018 To fill this gap, we carried out an experi- news to the public. Also, even though the newspa- ment using a real press release and news media ar- per articles were highly critical of the error of the ticles focusing on errors in supervision made by an AFM, their negative effect on trustworthiness was independent regulatory agency. Why do we focus limited. These findings suggest that it is possible to specifically on a mistake by an independent regulatory break bad news without necessarily breaking trust. agency (IRA)? First, we think that errors, as opposed to successes, have more influence on public per- The Potential Effects of Press Releases on ceptions because media coverage tends to focus on Citizen Trust what went wrong (Liu et al., 2010; Jacobs & Schil- lemans, 2016) and negative information tends to As mentioned, in this study we investigate the ef- have a stronger effect on judgments (e.g. Olsen, fects of a negative press release and related news- 2015). Secondly, this kind of communication is im- paper articles on public trust in a Dutch IRA. How portant because it functions as an informal ac- might such a press release affect the perceived countability mechanism. Jacobs and Schillemans trustworthiness of an IRA? Research in crisis com- (2016) have found that public organizations, in an- munication has developed and tested various or- ticipation of potential media scrutiny, exert “pre- ganizational responses to prevent reputational emptive self-criticism,” meaning that agencies dis- damage as a result of crises (e.g. Coombs, 2007). close failure themselves before it is revealed by the Two core elements in crisis communication that media. Thirdly, we focus on an IRA because these have been found to prevent reputation loss are tim- agencies face a somewhat less adversarial media en- ing and content of the message. First, self-disclos- vironment than some other government institu- ing information about a crisis helps to “steal thun- tions (Maggetti, 2012, p. 400; Van Erp, 2013; Glynn der”. By breaking the news about an internal crisis & Huge, 2014; Puppis, Maggetti, Gilardi, Biela, & before it is discovered by others, an organization Papadopoulos, 2014) and therefore citizens may be gains credibility and public trust (Claes & Cau- more amenable to information coming from a rel- berghe, 2012; Arpan & Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2005). atively independent government agency, as op- In our case, the communication strategy by the posed to organizations less independent from poli- AFM could be qualified as “stealing thunder”; a tics. press release and press conference provide the Specifically, we test the effect of a major news before news media can “scoop” the story. press release by the Dutch Authority for Financial Thus the effect of a pre-emptive press release is ex- Markets (AFM) and subsequent newspaper cover- pected to be relatively favorable. age in an experiment.1 The AFM is an IRA regulat- A second reason why we expect the press ing the financial markets in the Netherlands. We release to have a relatively favorable effect on pub- had the unique foreknowledge of the release date lic opinion (that is, not a negative effect) is that the of an upcoming press release and related attention press release, as opposed to the related news cov- from news organizations. A few days before the erage, focuses on a so-called “rebuild strategy”. press release came out, we carried out a pre-test to Such a strategy offers apologies for the crisis, which measure citizen trust in the AFM. Then the agency leads to more effective reputation restoration than, issued a press release and held a press conference. for instance, denying responsibility (Claeys, Cau- A week after the pre-test, we carried out a post-test bergh & Vyncke, 2010; Coombs & Holladay, 2008). survey in which various treatments were embedded In our experiment, the press release is pre- (the press release, three media articles on the AFM emptive and focuses on how the AFM attempts to and its supervision error, and a control group). We improve it operations in the future to prevent the also controlled for natural exposure to news about crisis from happening again. According to the the failure. Our results show a negative effect of the above-mentioned experiments on crisis communi- news media articles on perceived competence of cation, this should prevent reputation loss even the AFM, and a null effect of the press release on though it may not improve reputation either. This all dimensions of perceived trustworthiness (i.e. means that we propose essentially a null hypothesis competence, benevolence and integrity). We con- for the press release effect: clude that the press release was effective in decreas- ing the potential negative effect of providing bad H1: A press release does not negatively affect the perceived trustworthiness of an independent regulatory agency. 2 Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 1(1) whether or not they had read or seen news about We also take into account that many people will the issue at hand. The experimental set-up is sum- only hear about the AFM through news media cov- marized in Figure 1. erage and will not directly read the press release. We All respondents received the same pre- test the effect of newspaper articles that were in publication survey in which their pretest attitudes part based on the press release. Since the articles were measured (T0). For the post-publication sur- had a much more negative tone and did not have a vey, we randomly assigned participants to one of strong “rebuilding” focus, we expect that this cov- five experimental groups. One week later, their erage has a negative effect on perceived trustwor- posttest attitudes were measured (T1). The control- thiness:2 group was not shown any additional information; their questionnaire was the same as the baseline H2: News media coverage negatively affects the perceived measurement (T0). The other four groups were trustworthiness of an independent regulatory agency. shown some sort of information before completing the questions for trust in the AFM.