When the sender is the message: the communication of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa about the 2017 fires

Abstract

The theme of this article is the official crisis communication of the Portuguese Presidency (Presidência da República Portuguesa – PRP) during the forest fires that occurred in June and in October 2017, respectively known as the “tragedy of Pedrógão Grande” and the “October fires”. The fires of 2017 were the most harmful in Portuguese history and received wide coverage in the international media. That year, Portugal was the country that most suffered with fires, according to an European Union report (2018), accounting for about 90% of deaths caused by this type of fire in the entire area covered by the report. The main theoretical basis of this study is situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) (Coombs, 2007). In SCCT, Coombs (2007) identified the variables involved in a crisis and presented the most appropriate response strategies to be applied to each crisis type. Through the discourse analysis method, we described and compared the Portuguese Presidency’s communication on the management of these two crises of similar origins (forest fires), only four months apart (June and October 2017). Our aim is to contribute to an understanding of the response strategies proposed by Coombs (2007) when applied to communication exclusively based on the public information model (Grunig & Hunt, 1984). The research concluded that the PRP opted for the managing meaning strategy by adjusting information and predominance of the primary repair responses of the category “rebuild” and subcategory “compensation”, producing an appropriate response according to SCCT (Coombs, 2007). However, we note that the PRP crisis communication for the 2017 fires is a case in which the personal characteristics of the sender and the variables – crisis responsibility, crisis history and prior relationship reputation – were more relevant to the effectiveness of crisis communication than the messages themselves.