Employing new communication methods during the political crises in the 1980s

Abstract

The present article undertook the problem of crisis communication on the basis of the right-wing politicians who assumed office in the 1980s, president Ronald Reagan and prime minister Margaret Thatcher. It focused on political crisis communication, and made an effort to correctly define the term. Two theories were analysed: image repair theory (IRT) created by William Benoit and situation crisis communication theory (SCCT) by Timothy Coombs. However the main purpose of this article was to analyse the phenomenon of establishing and employing new methods of communication during political crises in order to effectively respond to the crises. Thus there was an effort made to coin two new political crisis communication approaches on the basis of the aforementioned topics: “unsmoked communication”
and “numerary communication”.