News Media Framing of Preventable Crisis Clusters. Case Study: Newborn Babies Killed in the Fire at a Romanian Hospital

Abstract

In crisis situations, public or private organi-zations become vulnerable. When organizations adopt the silence strategy, the public seeks in-formation in the news media which may induce the attribution of crisis responsibility. The crisis managers should check the news media framing of the (organizational and/or individual) respon-sibility level, the news practices of daily and tabloid press and the journalists’ use of the cri-sis issues and news frames of the situation. Our study will focus on one of the greatest tragedies in Romania, the newborn babies’ death during the 2010 fre at the Giuleşti Maternity Hospital in Bucharest. The comparative analysis focuses on the news media coverage of this crisis in the online versions of four national newspapers with the largest circulation. The content analysis high-lights the crisis news frames and issues in Roma-nian daily and tabloid newspapers. The fndings suggest that, despite the same salience of crisis frames (attribution of responsibility, human inter-est, economic consequences, confict, morality), the sensationalist and sober news stories differ in three ways: the assigning of the level of re-sponsibility, the crisis issues associated with the fve frames, and the coverage of the micro and macro-relations established between the organi-zations during the crisis situation.