ABSTRACT
News media and social media are external sources to monitor warning signs of a crisis (Coombs, 2014). News frames can induce negative emotions (Kim & Cameron, 2011), which can lead to negative behavioral intentions (Coombs, 2007, 2014). Prior research of news framing in crisis communication has focused on typology and effects of news frames (An & Gower, 2009; Cho & Gower, 2006). Little is known about the emotional effects of news frames that coexist in a news story (An & Gower, 2009; Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000), especially when the news story is disseminated on social media. The emerging model of social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC), posited by Jin, Liu, and Austin (2014), asserted the importance of dealing with negative emotions on social media. In our study of Malaysia Airlines’ missing flight crisis, we examined how the salience and order of two news frames (the investigation frame and the victims frame) in one news video, which was disseminated on social media, affected viewer emotions, and how the news-evoked emotions affected reposting intention, negative behavioral intentions, corporate reputation, and country image. The findings provide implications for how to provide effective organizational crisis responses.
