The Ideological Imperative: Corporate Social Responsibility and News Media Coverage of Firms

Although prior research attributes news media coverage of firms to the alignment of firm behavior with societal expectations of appropriateness, the appropriateness of firm behavior is judged through an ideological lens. Therefore, the influence of a firm’s behavior on its news media coverage is likely to be contingent on news organizations’ ideology. Focusing on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as the focal firm behavior, we argue that conservative news organizations are less likely to consider CSR an appropriate firm behavior because conservatives view CSR as privileging progressive ideals and as undermining shareholder interests. As such, we hypothesize that compared with other news organizations, conservative news organizations are less likely to cover socially responsible firms positively. This relationship is likely to be strengthened for firms led by conservative chief executive officers and for firms with poor stock market performance. We examined the coverage of the S&P 1500 firms from 2002 through 2011 in U.S. newspapers and found support for our hypotheses that compared with other newspapers, conservative newspapers report less positively about socially responsible firms and that this effect is strengthened for conservative-led firms. In contrast to what we expected, however, we found some evidence that socially responsible firms with a strong stock market performance are, in fact, covered less positively in conservative newspapers. Taken together, our theory and findings contribute to an understanding of how the news media’s ideological heterogeneity shapes the relationship between firm behavior (in our case, CSR) and news media coverage of firms.