President Barack Obama's image repair on HealthCare.gov

Obama's health care initiative HealthCare.gov went live on October 1, 2013. It was plagued with problems. Furthermore, the President promised that if people liked their current health care plan, they could keep it. People were shocked when they started to receive cancelation notices from their insurance companies. Republicans seized on the opportunity to savage the president, his administration, and his health care program. Obama's approval rating was anemic and on November 7, he was interviewed by Chuck Todd and on November 14, 2013, Obama held a press conference to try to mend his image. His defense relied heavily on mortification, corrective action, and minimization but also contained instances of defeasibility, bolstering, and transcendence. This essay uses Image Repair theory to analyze and evaluate the President's image repair effort.     

When sorry is not enough: Archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law's image restoration strategies in the statement on sexual abuse of minors by clergy

In January 2002, the Boston Globe ran a two-part story on sexual abuse of minors by clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston that sparked the biggest crisis in the history of the American Catholic Church. Two days after the articles appeared, Archbishop Cardinal Bernard Law held a press conference to respond to the Globe's charges. This study examines Law's image restoration strategies in his press conference and proposes that even though Law failed to restore his image, he provided a fitting response. The study proposes that one may attribute Law's failure to restore his image to his relational history with his audience and to the perceived offensiveness of his actions.     

Getting out of the doghouse: The image repair strategies of Michael Vick

Michael Vick's federal dog-fighting conviction in 2007 made him notorious. Vick spoke publicly about his role in the dog-fighting operation only once before beginning a prison term. Three years after entering prison, he returned to National Football League action. By 2011, some in the media proposed that Vick had successfully rehabilitated his image and redeemed himself in the eyes of the public. This study examines the image repair strategies Vick employed at his August 27, 2007, press conference. It concludes that Vick chose appropriate strategies but did not fully develop one critical strategy: corrective action. The paper also explores Vick's strategic use of the third person and appeals to a supernatural being.     

The Floyd Landis doping scandal: Implications for image repair discourse

Floyd Landis’ efforts to repair his image in the wake of charges that he used illicit substances to win the 2006 Tour de France have been judged a failure. Analysis of his complex and contradictory rhetorical strategies reveals three important implications for the theory and practice of image repair. First, the use of absolutive stances can be severely confounded by the introduction of strategies designed to evade responsibility. This essay explains why attempts to evade responsibility contradict the combined strategies of denial and differentiation in such a way that weakens image repair efforts and confuses audiences. Second, the success of third party bolstering, cited elsewhere as an effective means of repairing one's image, is dependent upon the credibility of those third parties. Third, attacks on one's accuser have their limitations and may even worsen one's public image in some instances.     

Image repair in late night comedy: Letterman and the Palin joke controversy

David Letterman, host of The Late Show, told a joke about Sarah Palin's daughter during one of his nightly monologues. During the ensuing controversy, Letterman offered two extended statements about the joke. Approaching Letterman's responses from the perspective of Benoit's image repair typology reveals three primary strategies: denial, mortification, and corrective action. While Letterman's first attempt to resolve the controversy failed, his second attempt was largely successful. Implications for public relations image repair strategies are offered.     

Despite years of failed treatments,patient cuts back on drinking

A social worker, a mother and conference calls all united for what looks at this time like a happy outcome for one young man, despite the failure of multiple treatments. Residential treatment, individual counseling, Vivitrol, AA attendance, an interventionist and a stint at an unlicensed rehabilitation center all may have helped in this case study of a young man — age 36 by the time he started working with Patrick Doyle, a social worker who is a family coach enlisted by the patient's parents. But ultimately, they all failed, and the young man was in risky territory, with binges and blackouts. What saved him was his mother's decision to stand up to the insistence by the “recovery team” on total abstinence. The recovery team included Doyle, who recounted the story to ADAW last week, the parents, the therapist, and the interventionist.     

Hooray for Hollywood? The 2011 Golden Globes and Ricky Gervais’ image repair strategies

British comedian Ricky Gervais created a media stir as host of the 2011 Golden Globes Awards ceremony by using what many celebrities in attendance and people in the television audience saw as harsh, mean-spirited jokes about the awards, guests, and nominees. Four days after the show, Gervais tried to respond to the backlash by appearing on Piers Morgan Tonight to defend his performance and to repair his image. Gervais employed a variety of image repair strategies: denial, evasion of responsibility, minimization, and mortification. He focused most attention on transcendence, inviting his audience to view the awards show and his performance as an artistic pursuit of truth and self-discovery. Ultimately, Gervais failed to adapt to his audience and failed to repair his image.     

Confidence and action: a comment on Barbalet

John Maynard Keynes is widely recognized as one of the greatest economists of the 20^th century. For a growing number of his interpreters, Keynes’s emphasis on uncertainty and on the psychological aspects of expectations about the future are among his most significant contributions. References to Keynes’s notions of confidence and animal spirits, for example, have increasingly appeared in the economic literature. In sociology, a stimulating recent book by Jack Barbalet (1998) tries to improve our understanding of social structure by redefining the role of emotions in social life. Barbalet also wants to correct what he understands as an insufficient attention to time on the part of social theorists. This double objective leads him to deal with confidence and some of Keynes’s ideas. His book represents a most valuable contribution to the sociology of emotions, time and uncertainty.The purpose of this paper is to comment on Barbalet’s discussion of confidence and the theory of action, and to contrast it with an alternative approach. Both Barbalet’s position and the alternative presented here involve an interpretation of Keynes’s theory of economic behavior under uncertainty, but go beyond doctrinal-historical issues and formulate original theoretical propositions. The present paper is intended as a positive contribution to the interaction between economists and sociologists interested in these issues. Barbalet’s book already represents an important step in this direction, for his social analysis considers, and incorporates insights from, the work of several economists, in addition to conveying well-founded criticisms of standard economic theory.As far as Barbalet’s interpretation of Keynes is concerned, the paper points out Keynes’s ambiguity regarding important issues and identifies interesting points of Keynes’s theory that Barbalet does not discuss or emphasize. The paper produces evidence against Barbalet’s equation of confidence and animal spirits in Keynes. It also shows that Keynes distinguished between expectations and confidence, a distinction not explicitly made by Barbalet. In addition, the paper enriches Barbalet’s discussion of Keynes’s monetary theory by relating uncertainty to the precautionary motive for liquidity preference.Moving from the history of thought to theory, the paper proposes an alternative analysis of confidence and action, and contrasts it with Barbalet’s approach. This alternative approach distinguishes between confidence and expectations, and suggests that these two elements are ultimately determined by three factors: knowledge, animal spirits (redefined as an optimistic disposition to face uncertainty) and creativity. The first two factors are seen as determinants of confidence through their influence on what is called uncertainty perception and willingness to face uncertainty (or uncertainty aversion). The paper is organized as follows. It begins by summarizing some aspects of Barbalet’s views on confidence, in section 1. It proceeds, in section 2, by presenting Barbalet’s interpretation of Keynes and discussing it. The next step is to present, in section 3, another theory of action in which confidence plays a crucial role. This alternative approach, which uses Keynes’s insights but goes beyond his work, is then contrasted with Barbalet’s views.     

Unpacking “the pimp case”: Aging black masculinity and grandchild placement in the child welfare system

The child welfare system is responsible for identifying long-term caregivers for children whose biological parents are unable or unwilling to care for them. Although grandparents are increasingly identified as custodians for their grandchildren, little is known about how grandparents are assessed by state actors. Using ethnographic data, this article unpacks the failure of one 63-year-old African American grandfather and his wife to gain custody of his grandson from foster care. This case–known informally as ‘the pimp case’ because of the unverified but widely accepted belief that he had earned income through sexual solicitation–illustrates how men's aging bodies and histories undermine their efforts to be seen as competent caregivers. This article shows how this grandfather's aging body and its perceived limitations became problematic, how his illegitimate social history was at issue, how their family form as grandparents (and thus, non-parents) was deemed illegitimate, and how these came together to mark race, class, and gender in interrelated–but also contradictory–ways.     

The media battle between Celebrex and Vioxx: influencing media coverage but not content

This study examined newspaper coverage of the battle between two pharmaceutical companies in the arthritis painkiller market and the impact that the companies’ public relations activities had on the way the story was presented. A framing analysis was used to determine the relationship between the companies’ messages and press content. Frames consistent with the companies’ objectives occurred, but most stories were rated as neutral, with an almost equal number of favorable and unfavorable stories. This suggested that the companies may have influenced the press on what to cover but not necessarily what to say.     

Ethnic appeal: A self-defense tool for Kenyan politicians

So far, analyses of apologetic rhetoric strategies as used by individuals or organizations to respond to accusations of wrongdoing have been concentrated in the West. An analysis of political apologia in an African setting – in this case Kenya – reveals that while Kenyan politicians have used denial, victimization, mortification, and counterattacking among other self-defense strategies, one particular strategy emerges as the most commonly used by Kenyan politicians – ethnic appeal.     

Failure of integration or symbol of racism: The case of soccer star Mesut Özil

In May 2018, Mesut Özil, a third-generation Turkish immigrant, was photographed with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This incident was constructed by the media and politicians as an endorsement for Erdoğan in the upcoming Turkish election and resulted in a public discussion about Özil's loyalty to German democratic values. The debate intensified especially after the World Cup and led to Özil's resignation from the national team via social media on 22 July 2018, where he cited racism against him as one of his reasons. Newspapers, news magazines and tabloids all over the world covered the story, discussing racism and the failure of German integration policies. Through a qualitative media content analysis of German national newspapers and tabloid press articles following the publication of the photograph of Erdoğan and Özil on 14 May 2018, this paper will analyse how Özil was portrayed in the media.     

Former Minister Zhang's discourse on SARS: Government's image restoration or destruction?

This study analyzes the image repair discourse by Chinese Health Minister Zhang Wenkang's discourse on SARS. The minister faced several accusations: the SARS outbreak was growing, the Chinese government had covered up the severity of this problem, the Chinese government ignored Taiwanese who suffered from SARS, and the Health Ministry provided information that was neither timely nor accurate. He employed several image repair strategies (denial, defeasibility, bolstering, minimization, differentiation, attack accuser, and corrective action). However, his messages were contradictory and apparently related on false information, so his efforts were unsuccessful and he was stripped of his office.     

Horace Cayton: Reflections on an unfulfilled sociological career

This article examines the abbreviated sociological career of Horace Cayton, the co-author of Black Metropolis and one of the most talented young black sociologists in the 1930s-1940s. In seeking to explain why Cayton failed to continue his promising sociological career, this article focuses on: his feelings of racial alienation; his inability to locate a theoretical paradigm in mainstream sociology through which he could express his anger about American racism; the narrow range of job opportunities open to blacks in sociology; his desire to become a novelist and, thereby, attain the intellectual freedom not afforded by mainstream sociology to protest American race relations; and, finally, his failure to comprehend the psychological perils of assimilation. He is presently doing research on the role of activist churches in Kenyan politics, attitudes toward skin color among African Americans and Africans, and normative accommodations of deviant survival strategies in Kenyan cities.     

Blowout!: Firestone’s image restoration campaign

In this application of image restoration theory, Blaney, Benoit, and Brazeal discover that Firestone botched its recovery efforts. Its attempt to shift blame to Ford was poorly conceived. Its corrective action was not perceived as addressing the problem at hand. Moreover, its use of Michael and Mario Andretti to bolster its product and reputation was limited by the obvious financial relationship with these professional drivers. Finally, the authors support past scholarship that scrutinizes the appropriateness of certain strategy combinations. Specifically, mortification and bolstering can be undermined by denial and corrective action.     

Unique crisis response strategies in sports public relations: Rugby league and the case for diversion

Sport is a unique ‘product’ in that most of its messages and images are conveyed through media coverage rather than through advertising or sales campaigns. While the coverage is usually positive, media interest becomes more problematic in high profile scandals which can be very damaging. In this paper, we propose that the culture of elite men's sport and its interdependence with mass media creates a situation in which sports public relations personnel have access to crisis communication strategies not previously specified in the existing literature. Based on textual analysis of media coverage of an Australasian men's rugby league salary cap scandal, we argue that, in certain situations, a sports organisation may draw upon a crisis response strategy that we term diversion in order to successfully limit the damage to the organisation's reputation. In particular, we suggest that the often intense ‘relationship’ that fans have with players may allow team sports to focus attention on players (and fans) as innocent victims with the result that negative publicity for the sport overall is reduced.     

PUBLIC SUICIDE AS A DEED OF OPTIONLESS INTIMACY

This article offers an ethnomethodological analysis of suicide practices in situ. By analyzing a videotaped record of a public suicide by a government official this article is able to examine the temporal relations between the unfolding suicide act and the situational contingencies arising from its interactional context. In the case examined, the suicide was planned as a ceremony, in part to indicate the official facing corruption charges. A press conference provided the pretext for the suicide ceremony in which the official intended to deliver a prepared speech to accuse his accusers and bid farewell to loved ones before shooting himself. Things turned out differently than he planned, though he did in the end shoot himself. The analysis focuses on how the audience's reaction to the imminent suicide foreclosed the suicide cermony while at the same time pre-emptying the pre-suicide speech deferring the impending suicide.     

Strategies for engaging foster care youth in permanency planning family team conferences

The present study examines strategies conference facilitators used to engage foster care youth in decision-making in the context of permanency planning family team conferences. Data collection included observations of permanency planning family team conferences, followed by interviews with foster care youth and conference facilitators. Data analysis focused on gaining a deeper understanding of how facilitators incorporate youth into decision-making, with a specific focus on the strategies they employed. Four strategies were identified in the analysis: creating a safe space, encouraging the youth voice, re-balancing power, and establishing a personal connection. The study's policy and practice implications, limitations and areas of further research are presented.     

Image repair in President Bush's April 2004 news conference

As the war in Iraq heated up in March and April of 2004 and casualties continued to climb, President George W. Bush's reputation continued the downward spiral it had experienced during the past year (from 71% approval to 49%) as more and more voters questioned his policies and fitness for office. He responded to this situation by holding only his third prime time press conference on April 13, 2004.