Breaking bad news without breaking trust: The effects of a press release and newspaper coverage on perceived trustworthiness

Abstract

Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of "bad new" on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release involving 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 negative 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 conclude that strategic communication by an agency can break negative news to people without necessarily breaking trust in that agency. And although effects of negative news coverage on trustworthiness were observed, the magnitude of these effects should not be overstated.

Can decision transparency increase citizen trust in regulatory agencies? Evidence from a representative survey experiment

“…Although there have been studies focusing on effects of so-called targeted transparency on stakeholder compliance (e.g. Fung et al 2007;van Erp 2011), transparency concerning their own decisions affecting citizen trust has been largely neglected in the literature (de Vries 2016; Six & Verhoest 2016;Grimmelikhuijsen et al 2018).…”

“…2007; van Erp 2011), transparency concerning their own decisions affecting citizen trust has been largely neglected in the literature (de Vries 2016; Six & Verhoest 2016; Grimmelikhuijsen et al . 2018).…”

The Communication Efforts to Build New Normal Era Tourism Awareness by the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy through the Media

“…Research on media framing and press releases has been carried out includes by J. Choi & S. Lee (2017) regarding framing analysis on press releases related to the crisis of the Fukushima nuclear power plant [13]; and S. Grimmelikhuijsen, F.D. Vries, and W. Zijlstra (2018) regarding the effects of press releases and media coverage on the perception of trust [14]; and by Lee & Basnyat (2013) regarding framing mapping during the H1N1 influenza pandemic [15].…”

“…The use of press releases is investigated because of its important function as a liaison with the public and the media, where press releases are a form of proactive communication to the public expressed by S. Grimmelikhuijsen, F.D. Vries, and W. Zijlstra in 2018 [6] and a tool to imply social meaning by choosing the right words so that they can maintain healthy relations with the public by Ling in 2017 [7]. In addition, according to Morton & Ramsey (1994) press releases are useful for publishing information from an organization, especially information that impacts or appeals to large groups of people [8].…”

Information and promotion genre regarding korean content in netflix press release

“…The emphasis on the function of the press release itself is focused on being a public communication tool regarding the companies/institutions that issue them to provide information to the public and build awareness regarding the company/institution itself (Grimmelikhuijsen et al, 2018), but, the information of press release sometimes also won't be used unless it attracts to certain group of society (Belch & Belch, 2018) , such as investors, shareholders etc (Kochetova & Ilyinova, 2018), besides its function as a company communication tool to public. So based on the development of the press release above, the definition of press release in this study can be adjusted and became, an article written from companies/institution's point of view engaged in various fields for various purposes, aiming to public or certain group of society, which can be published on any platform, whether owned or not, by the company itself, as well as in certain media companies.…”