Stakeholders, News Media and Social Knowledge: Comparing Crisis Communication in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the US

The proposed study seeks, through content analysis, to identify various stakeholders in times of national disasters, governmental responses to the crises and news coverage of such disasters or crises in cross-national settings. Informed by institutional theory, stakeholder theory and the perspective of sociology of knowledge, the purpose of this proposed project is threefold: first, to identify and locate the stakeholders against the backdrop of natural and man-made crises in terms of their jurisdiction, power and influences throughout the duration of the crisis; second, to determine the interplay among diverse stakeholders in times of disasters within and between nations in order to better understand the structure and processes of crisis communication; and third, to examine the construction of crises as mediated reality and its formation of social knowledge as manifested in the news to tackle the role and functions of news media in times of national disorder and instability.