Abstract
The inability to anticipate and address the current disruptive onslaught in communications has contributed to the erosion of trust in journalism, given rise to social media echo chambers, spawned “infodemics” that cause confusion during health crises and precipitated the rise of “low information” voters. In 2023, The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication published a call for original research that would expand existing communication theory or borrow theory from other disciplines that would help better explain and critique the current disruptive communication ecosystem. This forum represents the collective vision of the Page/Johnson Legacy Scholars for reimagining communication theory to confront a wide range of current communication challenges: disaster communicators’ mental health; misinformation; disinformation; organization-public relationship management; and the amplification of the public voice in mass communication. The scholars make a persuasive case for the need to expand existing theory, as well as the need to integrate fresh theoretical perspectives into communication scholarship to keep communication research relevant and useful.
The communications industries are undergoing a dramatic and prolonged period of disruption. According to the late Llorente (2021, para. 1), a pioneer in the advocacy of transparency and ethics in communications, “‘[D]isruption’ refers to the unexpected and simultaneous processes of interruption and irruption on the status quo.” He goes on to explain:
This word has gained significant popularity for describing many of the transformations taking place in the world. The global economic crisis of 2008, the rise of populist movements, polarization, the exponential development of social media, the widespread use of new technologies, artificial intelligence and the 5G revolution have created a global panorama of disruption.
And now, it seems, academia finds itself in a period of uncertainty and disruption as well (Palmer, 2025). In January 2025, millions of dollars in grants around DEI and green energy were withdrawn by the National Institutes for Health and the National Science Foundation, leaving many universities and labs in disarray. The current administration also announced sweeping changes in the way it covers indirect costs of research, such as maintenance and administration, capping them at 15% from the current 30% to 70% (Nawaz, 2025). That could translate into substantially less money supporting operations at research-oriented institutions. With funding structures in doubt, how can we as communication scholars continue to create research that benefits both the professions and society? And how do we demonstrate the utility of our research to a public increasingly skeptical of science?
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Society’s inability to anticipate and address the current disruptive onslaught in communications has contributed to the erosion of trust in journalism (Nelson & Lewis, 2023), given rise to social media echo chambers (Jiang et al., 2021), spawned “infodemics” that cause confusion during crises (Mirbabaie et al., 2020), and precipitated the rise of the “low information” voters. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, “Adults under 30 are now nearly as likely to have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites (52%) as from national news organizations (56%)” (Eddy, 2024). The decreasing level of trust in legacy media presents another challenge.
This forum was conceived as part of my work as a Senior Research Fellow for the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication. As a graduate student at University of Florida, the idea that theory was the bedrock of successful research underpinned everything I did: it guided hypotheses, study design, instrumentation, data collection, and analysis. But after 20 years in academe, and observing the seismic changes in the communication industries, our research is meant to explain, criticize, and support, and I increasingly wondered about the adequacy of existing communication theories to interrogate and explain the very real and disruptive forces facing the current communications ecosystem—artificial intelligence, misinformation, e-commerce, and on-demand content, to name just a few (Ahmed & Gil-Lopez, 2024; Karanicolas, 2023; Sinclair, 2016).
Discussions with Arthur W. Page Center Director Denise Bortree, Research Director Holly Overton, and JMCQ Editor-in-Chief Daniela Dimitrova ultimately resulted in a 2024 call to fund research that tests new theories and expands existing ones into innovative areas, while fostering and supporting ethical communication practice. We hoped to support research in keeping with the Page Principles, which focus on transparency and social justice while considering the myriad stakeholders impacted by organizational actions.
The five essays in this forum underscore the success of the call. Written by the 2024 Page/Johnson Legacy Scholars, they argue for the need to either expand upon existing theories or integrate new theoretical perspectives to address contemporary communication challenges:
J. Suzanne Horsley argues that current crisis and disaster communication literature is lacking in its consideration of the mental health of disaster communicators. She highlights that existing models do not factor in the emotional well-being of communicators or the affected publics. Her work proposes a new framework combining high reliability organizations (HRO) theory, the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) model, and Psychological First Aid (PFA) to fill this gap, demonstrating a need to expand crisis communication theory to include mental health considerations.
Shuning Lu and Yan Qu also suggest the need for a new perspective on existing theory by introducing a network approach to understanding resilience to online misinformation. While acknowledging valuable insights from existing models, they emphasize that the role of social networks in shaping misinformation resilience has been largely overlooked. Their framework of networked misinformation resilience highlights the necessity of moving beyond individual-level analyses and incorporating social mechanisms into theory. They propose a new focus on social networks by using the concepts of social capital, social influence, and social learning to improve resilience.
Jordan Morehouse, Virginia Harrison, and Chuqing Dong explicitly call for revisiting relationship management theory in public relations. They argue that existing theory is too organization-centric and fails to account for the complexities of managing multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests in a polarized society. They suggest integrating ethics of care and dialogic stewardship into relationship management theory, highlighting that current theory is inadequate to deal with the challenges that nonprofit organizations face in a polarized environment.
Hye Jin Yoon and Yan Huang introduce a new application of cognitive dissonance theory by focusing on disinformation and use it as a lens to consider the use of memes as a method of countering disinformation. They acknowledge the value of cognitive dissonance theory in understanding how people respond to conflicting information. However, they highlight that traditional communication tools may not be sufficient to address persistent disinformation and propose the use of memes to reduce dissonance and increase consonance, pointing to a need to expand methods and applications within existing theories to address these issues.
And finally, Dean E. Mundy and Sandra Boone make a strong case for a fundamental shift in mass communication theory, arguing that many existing theories prioritize organizations over the public. They state that today’s public has its own agenda and expects organizations to respond. The authors advocate for a re-evaluation of theories such as agenda-setting, the situational theory of publics, and uses, and gratifications from a public-centered perspective. They are calling for a theoretical redirection for the communication discipline to better understand the public’s role and influence in today’s communications environment.
In summary, the authors make a persuasive case that while existing communication theories provide a foundation for understanding public communication, they must be significantly expanded or re-evaluated to meet the demands of the current communication environment—and to anticipate and navigate disruptions yet to come. This forum highlights the need for new approaches, perspectives, and applications to address issues generated by the current disrupted ecosystem: mental health of communicators, the spread of online misinformation, the complexities of managing public relationships in polarized societies, the need for more effective methods for countering disinformation, and the importance of prioritizing the public voice in communication research. In doing so, they collectively call for a more relevant and effective body of communication research in the years to come. By prioritizing research designs that directly address the needs and challenges of both communicators and publics, we can create a knowledge base that is not only academically rigorous but also geared toward attacking real-world problems with integrity.