Strategy and Manipulation Tools of Crisis Communication in Printed Media

Abstract

The study deals with the question what communication strategies and manipulation tools institutions use in the field of mass communication, if they are in a given critical stage and solve disturbed relationships with the public through the unconventional forms of crisis communication. The study examines this issue in the advertising product ‘Understanding is everything’ which was published by Gulf Oil Corporation in 1984. The study shows that the tools of semiotic and discourse analysis are able to interpret the mediated contents of media texts when it detects a discursive field and communication processes which the text enters. The study concludes that different discursive fields and different communication processes and contexts which media products enter, generate different and even excluding interpretations of corporate communication and manipulative strategies.