Research On Rhetorical Strategies Of Government Crisis In Public Emergencies In The Context Of New Media

Society is in the midst of technological innovation and economic transformation,which can create many conflicts and problems,and our country is at a critical point in its modernization process.With "change" comes risk,and public emergencies,as high-risk events,occur from time to time during social development.The role of the government has profoundly transformed in the new media context as the leading decision-maker and primary responder of public emergencies.Therefore,how the government publicises its leadership activities in the crisis communication process as well as how to improve the crisis discourse and how to enhance crisis resolution has become an important issue to be urgently studied and explored.This study starts from the rhetorical orientation of crisis communication.On the basis of clarifying the concepts related to public emergencies and crises and the current situation of crisis communication,this study takes the corpus of 90 press conferences on the COVID-19 in Shanghai from March to June 2022 as the research object,introduces the division of crisis stages under situational crisis communication theory,the research methodology of case study and discourse analysis is used to analyze the government’s rhetorical strategies in different crisis situations.This study is structured into six sections.The first section is the exordium,which covers the background,significance,literature review,research methodology and content of this study.The second part is an overview of the definition of public emergencies,crises and situational crisis communication theory.It summarises the definition of public emergencies and crises in this study,and analyses the new characteristics of public emergencies in the new media context.It distinguishes the relationship between public emergencies and crises,crises and crisis situations,and the applicability of situational crisis communication theory in this study.The third section is the current situation of government crisis communication from the perspective of 5W elements.The fourth section analyses the rhetorical strategies of the March-June 2022 COVID-19 in Shanghai under the situational crisis communication theory.Firstly,different crisis stages are divided according to the development of the event,then the discourses in different stages are thematically counted,and five types of crises are summarised as the spread crisis of local COVID-19,livelihood security crisis,group psychological crisis,economic crisis and organizational management crisis.The rhetorical strategies used in these five types of crises are then discursively analyzed to examine how they fit the crisis context.The fifth section reflects on the rhetorical problems in crisis communication,and proposes reflections on the future rhetorical strategies for government crises.The sixth section concludes the paper with a summary of the innovations and shortcomings of the study.The study found that the rhetorical strategies used by the government in this crisis showed a dynamic change across the different phases of the crisis,in line with the response strategies suggested by situational crisis communication theory,but inevitably there was still an overuse of rhetorical strategies that did not fit the context of the crisis.Specifically,it is found that there are four major failures in government crisis rhetoric: misalignment of rhetorical subject and discourse content,wrong use of rhetorical style,frequent use of watered-down strategies,and lack of emotional appeal.Based on these failures in the use of crisis rhetoric strategies,four types of countermeasures are proposed to accurately grasp the positioning of rhetorical subjects,integrate emotional and rational appeals,build a professional system of rhetorical discourse,and respect the public’s equal subject status.