The Dilemma of Organizational Transparency: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of Media Reframing of Crisis Events in Danish and British Tabloids

Al-Yousefy, Jwan Adham

4. term

International Business Communication (English), Master

2025

2025-06-02

72 pages

Crisis communication frameworks highlight that organizations ought to prepare in the event of an organizational crisis by including crisis response strategies in their outward communication to journalists and the media. One specific crisis response strategy, namely, transparency, is expected by external and internal stakeholders. Transparency is attributed to raised expectations for ethical and social governance. That includes an expectation that institutions must hold themselves accountable in order to expect trust in return. Earlier practices show that organizational actors adopt silence or denial as a crisis response strategy, thereby increasing media scrutiny for perceiving silence as an inadequate response. This illustrates how certain response strategies may face backlash, which became a pivotal learning opportunity for managing organizational crises, ultimately leading to a proactive shift towards more transparent practices. Furthermore, the cases presented in this case relate to two crisis events that occurred in the past two years: in Denmark, three Danish companies were accused of being involved in doing business activities with Russian shadow fleets. This sparked intense media scrutiny and appeared in multiple local news outlets. In the UK, the Infected Blood Scandal resurfaced following a public inquiry, exposing how thousands were contaminated with blood by the National Health Service (NHS), leading to widespread public outrage and media condemnation. What both cases have in common is that Danish companies and the British government attempted to be transparent. Subsequently, this is the dilemma of transparency; a paradox in that transparency is embraced in academic discourse and organizational practices, while still being under media scrutiny. This thesis will examine why transparency responses failed for the three Danish companies allegedly involved in Russian shadow fleets. Particularly, one of those companies, Saga Shipping, was attempting to be open and truthful about its business activities. The thesis explores what organizations and crisis frameworks may be missing. The thesis will mainly aim to examine this dilemma through the media lens – specifically by analyzing how Danish and British tabloids reframe transparency through metaphors. Metaphors are a powerful, persuasive tool in engaging readers and structuring a specific understanding of an event. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory describes how each individual possesses a conceptual system that is fundamentally metaphorical. This conceptual system is sort of like a mental map built around metaphors, which structures our understanding of the world and how we frame events. This will lead to a comparative analysis between Danish and British tabloid coverage of reframing crisis events through metaphors, and what these cultural differences say about global trends of institutional distrust, even while transparency is a widely used communication strategy.

Metaphor ; Conceptual Metaphor Theory ; Media ; Tabloid Journalism ; Crisis Response Strategies ; Transparency ; Silence ; Denial

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