The External Supervisory Role Of Media Reports In Material Assets Reorganization Of Listed Companies

Compared with the mature legal systems of developed countries,the legal systems of developing countries are usually not sound and perfect.As the "fourth hand" independent of laws,institutions and governments,the media plays an important role in external supervision.In the past 20 years,media forms have gone through different stages of development.By the end of 2020,internet user base in China has reached 989 million and penetration has reached 70.4%,so the influence of online media can not be underestimated.Asset reorganization is one of the most important strategic decisions of an enterprise.Blind reorganization may cause huge losses to investors.Therefore,it is of great practical and theoretical significance to study the external supervision role played by network media reports in the material assets reorganization.This paper studies the fairness of network media reporting and the effectiveness of external supervision in the event of material assets reorganization.First of all,in combination with the current situation of China's media industry,this paper takes political bias as the proxy variable of the fairness of media reports,and gives its measurement method,so as to study the fairness of network media.Secondly,as the influence of negative reports will vary greatly due to different degrees of negative tone,when studying the effectiveness of external supervision of media reports,most existing literatures use the number of negative reports and the proportion of negative reports in the total number of reports to measure the degree of negative reports(Chen Zeyi et al.,2017;Xiong Yan et al.,2020).On this basis,this paper adds variables to measure the tone degree of negative media reports,and media attention degree is also added as a moderator,so as to explore the influence of media reports on external supervision of major assets reorganization events of the company.In this paper,major asset restructuring events of listed companies from 2014 to2018 were selected as samples,and relevant reports on Toutiao website were obtained through crawler.After text analysis of the reports,relevant variables to measure the degree of negative reports were obtained,and an empirical analysis was conducted on the fairness and effectiveness of online media reports.The results show that,in terms of fairness,there is no significant difference in the degree of negativity of the online media coverage of SOE restructuring and cross-border restructuring events preferred by the government compared with other material assets reorganization,that is,the fairness of the online media coverage is not affected by the government preference.The reason is that although the Chinese government has strict control over media reports,the diversified subjects of network media have weakened the influence of government intervention on media reports.However,overseas restructuring events have a significant inhibiting effect on the negative reports of official network media.Compared with other events,cross-border restructuring favored by the government is more likely to receive positive official network media reports.Official network media have certain political preferences and "self-protectionism",which leads to the bias of fairness.In terms of effectiveness,this paper finds that the negative reports of network media significantly increase the probability of restructuring failure,indicating that the media plays an effective external supervisory role in restructuring,and this external supervisory role is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises.This paper also finds that the attention of online media has a positive moderating effect on negative reports,that is,when the media attention is higher,the negative reports of the media play a more effective external supervisory role,and the online media play the role of "gatekeeper" in the capital market.The research of this paper provides empirical evidence for the fairness and effectiveness of network media's reports on the major assets reorganization event of the company,and provides inspiration for enhancing the external supervision role of media reports,improving the external governance level of the company,government supervision and guiding the development of the market.