Crisis communication under the critical eye of the media

One of the most important goals of PR is to build and maintain trust. A corporate crisis can jeopardize this goal which is why strategically deployed crisis communication is considered essential. The media has a major influence on how the crisis and the affected company are perceived by the public. This relationship between crisis strategies and subsequent media coverage is the subject of this paper. The crisis at Lufthansa in March 2015 serves as an example: the crash deliberately caused by the co-pilot in which 150 people lost their lives. Based on Coombs and Holladay's Situational Crisis Communication Theory a quantitative content analysis is used to examine whether criteria for successful crisis communication can be identified in German reporting on the accident and above all how these strategies were evaluated by journalists.