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Journalists not only represent political leaders in terms of their policies and political competence. The personalities and private lives of leaders have also become an important component in mediated stories and narratives crucial for voter identifi-cation and interest. This chapter explores how the Swedish press reports on prime ministers' social backgrounds, personal appearance and leadership characteristics in relation to party affiliation. The empirical material consists of news reporting on four former Swedish prime ministers: two from the Swedish Social Democratic Party; and two from the Moderate Party. The findings show that it is not only party affiliation that is of interest to journalists in reporting on prime ministers. Broader societal trends of what it means to be a politician in a certain time and era also influence reporting.

Research on crisis communication has traditionally focused on private organisations' reputation and blame avoidance strategies. As a result, there is limited knowledge on crisis communication from the perspective of public organisations. This is troublesome as public organisations have substantial responsibilities for preparing, communicating and managing large‐scale crisis events. In order to be able to better conceptualise public organisations' crisis communication, a typology based on communication aims and orientations is introduced. According to the typology, public organisations engage in two dimensions of crisis communication: reputation‐oriented vs. resilience‐oriented and strategic vs. operational. These dimensions are illustrated and discussed by empirical examples from the Queensland floods of 2010/2011. The paper ends with a discussion on how to understand these dimensions of crisis communication in relation to public organisations' priorities, processes and practices.

Despite the growing debate over the European Commission's (hereafter, Commission) role in crises, there are few systematic explanations for the variety of actions undertaken by the Commission in times of crisis. This article outlines a heuristic device to explain the Commission's actions during crises, based on the variables 'Commission mandate' and 'member state engagement'. To this end, it examines two crisis events that affected two strategically important policy areas for European Union integration: the early stages of the financial crisis that began in 2008 and the migration following the 2011 Arab Spring. Based on analysis of these cases, this study identifies four strategies applied by the Commission: doer, follower, cooperator and recycler. Our study concludes that member state engagement and Commission mandate are important variables in explaining under which circumstances these strategies are used by the Commission

This mixed‐methods study presents a comparative analysis of the use and perceived usefulness of Facebook and Twitter, among Swedish citizens and crisis communication professionals, as crisis communication tools and information sources. The use and perceived usefulness of Facebook and Twitter are not congruent and consistent between the two different groups, according to the overall study. Communication professionals, for example, report higher levels of perceived usefulness regarding Facebook's potential as a crisis communication tool than do the citizens. Taken together, the results show that researchers (within social media and crisis communication) and crisis managers both need to deal with the fact that social media is not a homogenous phenomenon with a single coherent role in crisis management and communication research and practice.

This article analyzes how the Norwegian news media framed the terrorist attacks in Oslo and the island of Utöya, which killed 77 mainly young people on 22 July 2011. Did the news media favour or counteract the propaganda of the terrorist? After discussing earlier research about terrorism and media and presenting theories on news framing, results from a content analysis of 924 news articles in two major Norwegian newspapers during the first two weeks after the attacks are analyzed. The coverage of the attacks is found to be very descriptive, focused on the perpetrator as an individual, giving him questionable political exposure and not analyzing reasons and consequences on a political–societal level. The news framing functioned as a way of depoliticizing the terror attacks by portraying the attack as conducted by a lone lunatic in contrast to a politically motivated terrorist linked to right-wing extremism.

The Muhammad cartoon crisis in 2005 provides an illustrative example of how crises travel across geographical boundaries, in this case, from a national newspaper into a full-fledged public diplomacy crisis at the international level. From a crisis management perspective, a multilevel setting poses a real challenge to actors trying to contain the situation at hand. Likewise, the multilevel nature of a crisis poses a challenge to crisis communication theories, which have traditionally focused on rhetorical strategies in single organizational crises. As a response, this article proposes a framework for examining crisis communication based on how actors' framing impact the perceptions of arenas, stakeholders, and communication strategies. [Reprinted by permission; copyright Sage Publications Inc.]

The Muhammad cartoon crisis in 2005 provides an illustrative example of how crises travel across geographical boundaries, in this case, from a national newspaper into a full-fledged public diplomacy crisis at the international level. From a crisis management perspective, a multilevel setting poses a real challenge to actors trying to contain the situation at hand. Likewise, the multilevel nature of a crisis poses a challenge to crisis communication theories, which have traditionally focused on rhetorical strategies in single organizational crises. As a response, this article proposes a framework for examining crisis communication based on how actors' framing impact the perceptions of arenas, stakeholders, and communication strategies.

Climate change has been seen as a crisis looming in the future, and has therefore not reached the top of the political agenda. This no longer holds true when looking at Australia, where climate change has become high politics. In this paper we examine the Australian electoral debate in terms of accountability framing, where the Government and Opposition were involved in a 'framing contest'. We argue that theories on accountability framing in crisis need to be modified in order to capture the complex dynamics of climate change due to its inherent scientific uncertainty and global nature. After conducting an inductive analysis of Australian Broadcasting Corporation‐reporting we found three themes to be of importance for accountability framing in the 'risk society': labeling, linking and coping.