significant presence in media writing of corporate press releases, which are often reproduced more or less verbatim. The tone of the organisa- tional response is likely to be picked up and either endorsed or dismissed by the publication depending on its political stance and likely readership response. Response strategies are tailored to the intended audience, and Stephens, Malone, and Bailey (2005) draw on stakeholder theory to dis- cuss the shifting importance of varying stakeholders at a time of crisis.
The intended audience for crisis response communication is found to make a difference to structure and tenor, as well as content and level of detail.
This is particularly crucial for crises that require technical explanation, as is the case for BP Deepwater Horizon. Just as media writing is multi- voiced, so business communication is co-created by individuals, includ- ing the Chief Executive Officer, the Communications Director and other writing professionals involved, as well as by the company culture, and the norms of the industry within which it operates. The balance between the corporate and the personal in crisis communications is a potentially inter- esting aspect for language study. BP itself encountered well-publicised dif- ficulties in finding an effective public communications approach.
The media story is as follows. On 20 April 2011 an oil-drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which was operated by Transocean on behalf of BP, exploded; 11 rig workers were killed, and 17 were injured. BP’s report on the crisis (BP incident investigation team, 2010), as well as a US National Commission report for the president (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011), described how a series of faults and failures contributed to the cata- strophic event, each of which in isolation might have been controlled.
These included the suitability of the design of the well, faults in the construction (particularly the failure of the cement fixing), the failure of various early warning systems, the failure of the blowout preventer and human error. In his book telling the story of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and BP’s subsequent handling of the crisis, Bergin (2011) sug- gests that this range of direct causes can be situated within two broad background contexts—a management and organisational culture within BP that encouraged productivity improvements at the expense of health and safety, and a US regulatory system for the industry made lax by the historically strong influence of oil interests on the US government.
Heading the handling of the media story personally, Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP at the time of the explosion, had very early tried to dis- sociate BP from the failures leading to the disaster (Bergin, 2011) and named its partners on the rig, particularly Transocean, as being primar- ily to blame, while accepting BP as ultimately “responsible” in the sense defined by the US Environmental Pollution Act of 1990. The BP report names eight failures, of which seven can be attributed to sub-contractors.
The National Commission report highlighted nine causal factors, which were very similar to those BP identified, but placed the blame “at BP’s door” for seven or possibly eight of these.
From a media perspective, the focus of the story changed over the con- siderable period in which it was covered by news outlets, and these myriad aspects of the story make it of particular interest for research, as the crisis is shown in the media to have resonance from a number of socio-cultural perspectives. The search for the 11 missing men was abandoned within a few days, and Tony Hayward and his team expressed their deep condo- lences for the tragic loss of life. Crisis teams, both technical and commu- nications, were assembled immediately, and work on both fronts carried
on day and night. There was significant uncertainty about controlling the oil spill; the rig was working in deeper water than had been attempted before, and there had been so many equipment failures in the lead-up to the explosion that standard options for containment were no longer avail- able. From the onset of the crisis, Tony Hayward insisted personally on being the face and voice of BP during this crisis period (Bergin, 2011: 228).
The BP communications team was trying to control speculation, but had limited information to impart, and journalists working on the story at the time recount the frustration within the media community as questions at press conferences were heavily restricted. These restrictions had the outcome that journalists sought interpretations from a range of sources.
After a week of daily press releases concerning the efforts to block the oil spill, Quarter 1 financial results for BP were issued. Some of the news stories mentioned the financial results in passing, while financial reports and business pages mentioned the oil spill in terms of its likely impact on the business health of the company.
The Deepwater Horizon oil well was finally capped in July of 2010 after 12 weeks of oil spillage. In September 2010 Tony Hayward was forced to resign, owing to concerns about his management of the spill, and his han- dling of the media. He was replaced as CEO by American Robert Dudley, previously head of BP’s joint Russian venture TNK-BP. BP accepted legal responsibility for the spill; that is, that in a specific legal sense they accepted that they were liable for clean-up and other compensation costs.
With the cooperation of local agencies, they coordinated a significant clean-up operation. Compensation mechanisms were set in motion for individuals and communities affected by the spill, and compensation dis- putes, as well as more positive stories, were the focus of much media coverage. Compensation payments ran concurrently with legal proceed- ings to determine the causes of and specific responsibility for the spill.
The results of BP’s own investigation into the incident were published in September 2010 (BP incident investigation team, 2010), and those of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling were published the following January (2011). Apart from their different readings of the “facts” mentioned above, the tone and presentation of the two reports are substantially different. The BP report reads something like a UK Government report, using plain language that
suggests objectivity. The National Commission Report from the USA, in contrast, is given an informal title (“Deep Water”), is illustrated with non-technical photographs and is dedicated on the first page to those who died and their families. These two texts on their own provide an early insight to how even broad agreement on the “facts” of the case can give rise to significantly different discursive constructions of the crisis.
Once clean-up operations in the Gulf were finished, the waters of the Gulf and its wildlife continued to be monitored by BP and other US agencies.
The costs of the clean-up and compensation, estimated at over $40 billion by March 2014, as well as the sale of assets to fund them, left BP in a fragile financial position, exacerbated by falling oil and gas prices in early 2012.
Large legal settlements were still being made in 2015. BP entered into several high-profile sponsorships, most notably as an official partner of the London 2012 Olympic Games and as sponsor of the World Shakespeare Festival.
This overview of events indicates how, over the two years for which I examined media data, the core story of the explosion and the subsequent environmental disaster was supplemented by other related events and actions, for example, the clean-up operation and the legal process of com- pensation. But there were more profound changes in the story than can be accounted for by this additional content. The language used by the media to construct the story of the crisis changed in fundamental ways: in the representation of certainty, for example, in referencing the crisis and in associating it with other events. Taken together, these changes can be under- stood as shifts in media representation from one perspective to another.
Understanding these shifts involves taking a broad and holistic view of the data and I suggest that conceptualisations from the study of semiotics can be used to provide a fresh perspective on the study of written texts.
© The Author(s) 2017 27
J. Gravells, Semiotics and Verbal Texts, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58750-3_2