Are Media Coverage Grounded On The Facts?

The advancement of mobile Internet technology has promoted the rapid development of the media industry.At the same time,the development of the media industry has aroused extensive discussions among scholars about the validity of media questions.Early research shows that investors generally believe that the media has played an important and active role in exposing corporate fraud,violations,and infringement of the interests of small and medium investors.With the advent of the media era,financial news media reports have become more emotional,so the validity of media questioning is inevitably doubtful.So how to prove the validity of the media questioning? The media questioned whether effectiveness can have a positive impact on the governance of listed companies? The answer may be found in the non-administrative punishment supervision system established in recent years.The governance effect of the media on listed companies has been a hot issue in academic research.In recent years,due to the widespread use of exchange letters and other exchange letters,domestic research on non-administrative punishment supervision has gradually increased,but few scholars will Combine the two.In fact,real media reports and rumors often coexist.In order to protect investors' right to know,on the one hand,the CSRC requires listed companies to issue announcements to clarify rumors after media queries arise;on the other hand,listed companies may issue clarification announcements but do not solve existing problems.A letter will be issued to a listed company,and the requesting company must respond to questions raised by the media in the reply.It can be seen that media reports will cause the intervention of administrative regulatory agencies.Administrative intervention often means that regulatory authorities may take administrative(non-administrative)punishment measures for listed companies,which will increase the cost of violations of the companies involved,and will also force the companies involved.The effects of corrections will ultimately improve the level of corporate governance.In response to the above problems,this article compares the content of the questioning of listed companies in financial media reports,company clarification announcements and exchange letters.If the media questioned the issue of the listed company in the report,after the company clarified it,it was mentioned in the letter of the exchange.This shows that the exchange has paid attention to the content of the media question,and the media question is effective.At the same time,the more media questions appear in the exchange letter,the higher the effectiveness of the media questions.This article collects the clarification announcements related to media reports disclosed by listed companies in 2014—2018 and the corresponding media report texts,and all letters issued by Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange to listed companies in 2014—2019.Through manual sorting and verification,this paper constructs two indicators to measure the effectiveness of media: whether the media questioned content(QCL)appears in the exchange letter and the number of media questioned content(QCL_num)appears in the exchange letter,respectively.The exchange letter's attention and citation rate to the media's questioned content.The research in this paper found that with the implementation of the nonadministrative punishment supervision system,the effectiveness of media questioning has been greatly improved.At the same time,the media questioning content has been greatly increased by the follow-up of the exchange letter,and the number of media questioning content in the exchange letter has increased significantly.Through regression analysis,this paper finds that the effectiveness of media questioning is affected by four types of characteristics: media characteristics,company characteristics,event characteristics and clarification characteristics.First,at the level of media characteristics,the higher the authority of the questioning media,the more effective the media questioning will be,and the more it will trigger the exchange to follow up.Second,at the level of company characteristics,compared to the companies with ordinary influence,the questioned companies' The greater the influence,the more effective the media questioning;again,at the level of the questioning event,the greater the company's incidents involved in the media questioning,the greater the effectiveness of the media questioning.Finally,at the level of the company's clarification characteristics,compared to companies that actively clarify,The more negative the clarified attitude of the company being questioned,the more effective the media questioning.In further research,this article finds that the media plays the role of "public opinion sentinel" in the governance of listed companies.The effectiveness of media questioning has a significant positive impact on the governance of listed companies.The more effective the media questioned,the more likely it was to suppress the earnings management behavior of listed companies.At the same time,this paper uses the propensity score matching method(PSM),replacement index measurement method and replacement regression method to test the robustness,and the conclusion is still true.In summary,this article takes the one-to-one correspondence between exchange letter content and media questioning content as an entry point,and constructs two measurement indicators,which provide direct evidence for verifying the effectiveness of media questioning.This article explores the factors that affect the effectiveness of media questioning from an empirical perspective,and further studies the impact of media questioning effectiveness on the governance of listed companies.At the same time,this article enriches the research perspectives of the media's questioning the effective factors,and also provides theoretical support for the construction of my country's nonadministrative punishment supervision system.