Carmen Salgado, María José Cavadas, Mercedes Zamarra: EMOTIONAL COMMUNICATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS: FILOMENA CASE
Review Article
Carmen Salgado, University Complutense Madrid, Spain
María José Cavadas, University Complutense Madrid, Spain
Mercedes Zamarra, University Complutense Madrid, Spain
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59014/HFSL3825
Keywords:
communication, crisis, emotional, empathetic, environmental disaster
Abstract
The Filomena snow storm, which occurred between January 8 and 10 of 2021 in
Spain, was an essay on how communication should be approached to facing an environmental
disaster. The storm hit Madrid with special fury . The city was collapsed
for 15 days. For two weeks prolonging the long confinement imposed as a result of
Covid 19. Two crisis overlapped: the healthy and the produced by an atmospheric
agent. However those circumstances did not lead on a political crisis. The alliance between
local authorities and media favored a type of communication that empathized
with the citizens. The main objective of this article has been to analyze the causes
that have made Filomena an atypical crisis that has prevented the fall of the local
government. The methodology applied has focused on studying how the media transmitted
to citizens the narrative designed by the local government, based on messages,
especially images, that generated empathy with the population. The main conclusion
is that an empathetic communication campaign, based on visual resources, reduces
social unrest and the risk of political crisis.
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