Identifying Crisis Response Strategies during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Sphere of Iranian Media

Objective
Emerging crises such as the Covid-19 Pandemic raise many uncertainties and create information needs. Media are the most available sources to fulfill this need. Adopting appropriate strategies at the beginning of a crisis is a critical task the media can do to manage the situation. Based on crisis communication studies, rapid response to a crisis is needed, so the response at the outset is beneficial. Iranian Formal and social media during the Covid-19 pandemic adopted strategies to meet the information needs of the people and also to help solve the crisis, which makes it necessary to study their ways of responding to the crisis. Understanding the strategies of these two types of media both creates a context for evaluating their performance in crisis conditions and reveals the power and management style of informal media in Iran. A conceptual review of the published articles shows that no study has been reported with a direct focus on media management, especially traditional media. Also, studies related to crisis response strategies mainly focus on commercial companies and so far no article has been published about the response strategies of the Iranian media in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Because the media messages in crises are indicative of their crisis response strategies, this paper focused on the situational crisis communication theory. Coombs (1955) suggested 5 types of strategies: Nonexistence which includes four tactics (deny, clarification, attack, intimidation); Distance by two tactics (Excuse and Justification); Ingratiation which consists of three tactics (bolstering, transcendence, and praising others); Mortification that is made of two tactics (remediation and repentance), and Suffering.
Research Methodology
News and content of the first 7 months of the epidemic on TV and Instagram are analyzed to study both the differences and similarities of crisis response strategies in them and to reveal the way of media management at the mentioned time. A total of 257 news items related to Corona virus have been broadcast by the first channel of the TV at 21.00, and 659 pieces of content related to the topic have been produced on Instagram sample pages all of which are analyzed.  The method used in this research article is a thematic analysis that is a type of qualitative data analysis. To find themes, structural coding is used. First, the coded text was described and the basic themes were identified. Then interpretative coding was done and the basic themes were divided into core themes or codes based on repetitive and distinctive features. Finally, global themes have been identified. In the heart of the global themes, there is a distinct concept that is called the macro theme. The validity of the research has been achieved by using a large amount of news and Instagram content in the research period which is named pluralism. The reliability of the research was measured in two stages of coding and the percentage of agreement was calculated during them. The percentage of agreement or PAO reliability coefficient in this study was 0.91, which is favorable.
Findings
The findings show the presence of three mega-themes in both media, which include the conditions of encountering the disease, the actors of the crisis, and the solutions to the crisis. In the news, Iran has been represented in the face of the coronavirus from two perspectives, that is, the conditions of governance and underlying factors. Iranian people are seen in two categories including good citizens and bad citizens which creates distance between different social groups. The problems of the medical system, the government's passivity, inaction, and sanctions are issues related to the theme of governance in Iran, which can be recognized in the news. Sanctions are caused by external factors and enemies, and the problems of the medical system have occurred due to the increase in the number of patients, which is different from the weakness and incompetence of the management of the medical system. This situation can be an indication of the suffering and hardship that the government has faced in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the news, solutions are presented by three global themes, which include individual, collective, and political solutions. In total, political solutions were repeated 82 times, individual solutions 62 times, and collective solutions 12 times in the samples. Political solutions show the government's efforts to face the coronavirus and manage the pandemic in Iran. On Instagram, the issue of Covid- 19 pandemic is identified with three main themes, which are the nature of the disease, background conditions, and consequences. On Instagram, the dominant image is negative for the general public and positive for officials and medical staff. The reason for the negative portrayal of the people is the non-compliance with the guidelines. This way of narrating or portraying the actors creates a distance between the people and the officials and the medical staff. The solutions offered on Instagram are based on four global themes and include treatment, lifestyle changes, prevention, and management. In total, individual solutions (170) are thirteen times the number of non-individual solutions (13). The predominance of individual solutions to collective ones can be considered equivalent to assigning responsibility to individuals and emphasizing individual responsibility to solve the pandemic crisis.
Discussion & Conclusion
Applying the themes to crisis response strategies shows that both media have used four strategies of ingratiation, distance, suffering, and mortification. The tactic used in the two analyzed media for ingratiation strategy is praising. Creating two categories of good and bad agents, which are done in the form of negative activism of people/positive activism of officials on Instagram, or good and bad citizens on TV news, reveals the distancing strategy. The strategy of suffering by portraying Iran as a victim of the intentionality of malicious foreign enemies such as the United States, which is the cause of sanctions, is present in both media, but it is prominent on television. The strategy of mortification has been carried out with an emphasis on the allocation of support packages to the affected businesses and the implementation of the faithful sympathy plan by distributing food packages to families and disadvantaged groups. The two strategies of distance and suffering prevent the attribution of too much responsibility to the officials, and the two strategies of ingratiation and mortification try to prevent the attribution of responsibility for the crisis to the officials by spreading positive interpretations of the officials among the public opinion. The present study has implications for media management and is an attempt to enrich the research literature in the field of crisis communication and the role of the media in responding to the crisis.