Running head: WHEN THE MYTH OF SAFETY COLLAPSES 1 When the myth of safety collapses The interplay between TEPCO, media, government, and the pubic awareness in the case of Fukushima Daiichi disaster Reina Kurobori University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Communication Master's Thesis Student number: 10700900 Program: Master's Program in Communication Science Track: Corporate Communication Supervisor: Dr. Friederike Schultz Date of submission: 26 June 2015 WHEN THE MYTH OF SAFETY COLLAPSES 2 Abstract Studies regarding how organizations minimize their reputational damages via communication in crises receive much attention today. However, they are also criticized for neglecting the constructivist approaches that actors rather make sense of each other during crises in order to maintain their legitimacy. The present study therefore concerns how different actors interact with each other through communication during the crisis. Taking Fukushima Daiichi disaster as an example case, the study content analyzed a total of 2134 documents issued between March and June 2011 by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), media, and the Japanese government using free open source called Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit (AmCAT). The study also included data extracted from Google Trends in order to examine agenda-setting effect between the media and the publics. Frequency analysis reveals the results which overall contradict to the classic agenda-setting, and -building effects except for the partial confirmation recognized in the results of intermedia agenda-setting. Semantic network analysis highlights different associations of concepts for each medium rather than similarities between these actors. Another set of associative frames demonstrates how the linkage of concepts changes over time. It is notable that three months after the outbreak, the only issue agenda strongly appears between TEPCO, media, and the government was TEPCO's responsibility. The fact that all actors failed to address other issues might have contributed to the criticism regarding the crisis management in this case. Keywords: Semantic network analysis, crisis communication, agenda-setting, agenda-building, associative frames WHEN THE MYTH OF SAFETY COLLAPSES 3 When the myth of safety collapses: The interplay between TEPCO, media, government, and the pubic awareness in the case of Fukushima Daiichi disaster "At the level of social life, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions" (Lippmann, 1922 p. 15). Do we live in a fictitious world? Not necessarily. However, this statement made by the prominent author Walter Lippmann certainly has a point. As he argues, the reality is so enormous, manifold, and short-lived that we judge and select a part to create our own map, which helps make our way across the world filled with ocean of information (Lippmann, 1922). Especially in crises where ambiguity clouds the vision to create the map, people are in search of information. At the same time, those who caused the problems attempt to distribute appropriate information that can maintain people's positive perception towards them (Sohn & Lariscy, 2015). Living in an economic driven world today, research concerning the way in which minimizes the financial and reputational damage of corporations has been much discussed, particularly through the application of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (e.g. Coombs, 2007; Coombs & Holladay, 2002). Through the notion of agenda-setting and -building, researchers also have been examining the relationships how information from communicators influences receivers. Nevertheless, these approaches lack constructivist perspective that actors negotiate and make sense of each other in crises via communication so that they find the ways to clarify and justify themselves (e.g. Patoriotta, Gond, & Schultz, 2011). Recently, a new concept of associative frames has been proposed (e.g. Schultz, Kleinnijenhuis, Oegema, Utz, & Van Attenveldt, 2012) to overcome such deficits, but it still remains unclear how interaction between various domains in crises produces the agendas, which affects the reconstruction of the "reality" due to the limited number of studies. Moreover, little research has been conducted on the governmental crisis communication (Schultz & Raupp, 2010). WHEN THE MYTH OF SAFETY COLLAPSES 4 The current study therefore attempts to fill these gaps in research by focusing on one of the recent and worst nuclear crises that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011. The main research question is "How did different actors communicatively interact with each other during Fukushima Daiichi disaster?" The three sub research questions were also formulated to specify the interest of this study. Sub-question 1: How did the media's interaction in the case of Fukushima Daiichi disaster associate with attention and network of other domains? Sub-question 2: How did the interplay between Tokyo Electric Power Company (hereinafter TEPCO), media, and the government change over the period of three months? Sub-question 3: How did the Japanese and the British newspapers report the crisis differently? To answer these questions, the current study content analyzes documents issued by three main communication media with the help of free software called Amsterdam Content Analysis Toolkit (hereinafter AmCAT). The study also includes data from Google Trends, which can numerically present any terms searched online, to examine how the media reporting influenced the public awareness. The next section addresses relevant literature concerning sensemaking and different levels of agenda-setting and -building. The method includes overall research design, data collection, and analysis plan. Results are also analyzed in the paper, following which the theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Theoretical background Making sense of crises via corporate, political, and medial communication Coombs (2007) defined a crisis as "a sudden and unexpected event" (p.164) that disturbs the daily operation of organizations and moreover threats their financial performance and reputation. Besides physical and emotional damage causing to people, reputational damage due to crises could be fatal to the business of organizations. Coombs (2007) proposed the SCCT (Situational Crisis Communication Theory), which empirically demonstrated how WHEN THE MYTH OF SAFETY COLLAPSES 5 organizations could minimize reputational damages. Accordingly, there are three types of crises (i.e. victim cluster, accidental cluster, and preventable cluster) and organizations are able to avoid the worst-case scenario by taking appropriate responses (e.g. denial, apology) that fits into the situation. Although SCCT is a very practical approach, it is criticized to be too simple and pay far too much attention to organizations, especially in the private sectors (Schultz & Raupp, 2010; Schultz, Utz, & Göritz, 2011). It is also considered that SCCT lacks the interactive nature of communication. Some scholars addressed the notion of sensemaking in crises, which referred to acts by organizations, seeking answers for the questions such as "what is going on?" "why it happened?" and "who is responsible?" through the interaction with others (Maitlis & Sonenshein, 2010; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). During the crisis, uncertainty is one of the main components and hence organizations delivering the proper messages and the publics understanding what happened enable the society to move forward and proceed to the next step of taking actions (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991; Weick et al., 2005). In other words, sensemaking is considered as to bring a sense of control to the crisis, and consequently reduces the damage and reputation at stake. The following part illustrates how different domains interact, make sense of each other, and affects to one another by introducing the concept of agenda-setting and - building. The interplay between the media and the public: Agenda-setting Agenda-setting concerns how agendas in the media are transferred to the public. This derives from the question that some media agendas receive great amount of attentions from the publics while others do not (Dearing & Rogers, 1996). The notable Chapel Hill study by McCombs and Shaw (1972) is considered as a classic case, which analyzed the relationship between the media and the publics, and confirmed how media coverage positively affected public agendas. This implies that when media provide news, people would be able to identify WHEN THE MYTH OF SAFETY COLLAPSES 6 and judge what are the crucial issues for them (Carroll & McCombs, 2003). Press "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about (Cohen, 1963, p.13, italics added). When the agenda-setting process is continuously practiced, public opinions would be formed (Carroll & McCombs, 2003). The study started in the political context, yet later studies (e.g. Carroll & McCombs, 2003; Kim, Kiousis, & Xiang, 2015) included the corporate context. A study that further confirmed agenda-setting between the media salience and financial performance of companies to some extent as well as corporate reputation perceived by the publics (Kiousis, Popescu, & Mitrook, 2007). First level of agenda-setting (Salience of objects). The idea of agenda-setting is usually discussed at different levels. The first level concerns the salience of objects, as Kim et