E.coli Outbreak, Romania and Crisis Communication: A Case Study on the Brădet Dairy Products

The E.coli outbreak in Romania and the crisis of the babies’ illness in Romania has evolved between February 4 and April 12, 2016. Throughout this period, the media emphasized the crisis by putting pressure on Romanian institutions to find out the cause of these mass diseases (Cioacă, Briciu, 2017, 307). Starting from these data, this paper aims to examine how the instructional risk messages are communicated to the large public by the Romanian online media outlets. Using the IDEA Model for effective instructional risk and crisis messages (Sellnow et al., 2012) and the Exemplification theory (Zillmann, 1999), this research presents a content analysis of online news articles published by 48 media outlets. The findings showed that the most used IDEA element is Explanation(E), constructed by emphasizing scientific information combined with the presence of the national institutions and experts. This element was used together with the element of Internalization(I), constructed by the emphasis of proximity and personal relevance for the publics. Three main themes could be highlighted: (1). the quest for the disease source; (2). the personal relevance of the epidemic; (3). the effective measures associated with the actions/statements of national experts.