Rhetorical Framing in Corporate Press Releases: The Case of British Petroleum and the Gulf Oil Spill

Abstract

This article examines how British Petroleum (BP) used conventional features of the press release genre to characterize its involvement in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Findings suggest that press releases served two related functions: individually, they highlighted the company's public attempts to stabilize a dynamic situation and take responsibility for seemingly positive developments in the coastal region; and together, they contribute to an evolving narrative through which BP attempted to craft its image as an innovative corporation, conscientious environmental agent, and generous benefactor to those affected by the spill. The author argues that the features of the press release genre contribute to strategic rhetorical framing and thus offer important insights into the ways in which organizations position themselves in relation to environmental crises.

Keywords:

• Gulf oil spill
• BP public relations
• rhetorical framing
• press release genre
• promotional discourse

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their incisive and helpful readings of the manuscript. Thanks also to Derek Van Ittersum, Kim Hensley Owens, and Kory Ching for their constructive feedback throughout the duration of the project.

Notes

1. By June 2010, BP had purchased multiple Internet search terms related to the spill. So, if someone searched on Google for “oil spill,” or “claims,” he or she would find a “sponsored link” to BP's Gulf of Mexico Response page at the top of a long list of websites (see Goldwert, 2010). Heather Dougherty, weblog analyst and Director, Research, for the website Experian Hitwise, claims that in early June, “47% of all traffic to BP.com was driven by search and 22% of all search traffic was from paid search terms.” She adds that approximately “60% of all visitors to BP.com were new, meaning they had not visited the website in the past 30 days.” At the very least, and judging from these approximations, BP made efforts to direct web traffic to its site and, potentially, to the archive of press releases that was mounting between April and September 2010.

2. Jacobs (1999b) borrows the phrase “flow in sync” from Gandy (1982, p. 57).

3. For additional context, BP issued only one press release during January, five during February, and nine during the entire month of March. Just as revealing, perhaps, is the fact that, after September, BP issued only one Gulf-related press release for the remainder of 2010. It is possible to see this as an attempt to shift attention away from the Gulf spill as a catastrophic incident to a problem that had been resolved.

4. “BP Confirms Scheduled White House Meeting.”

5. The number of Updates released also decreases from a total of nine in July to one in August and five in September.