| The media as an intermediary for information collection and dissemination should have a realistic attitude,adhere to the principle of objective neutrality in the reporting process,and strive to present complete,accurate and effective news information.However,in reality,the media may cater to interest-related readers,advertisers,etc.,by rendering and transforming the content of the report in order to maximize profits,or may be subject to government intervention to convey certain ideological preferences in reports,therefore media bias often appears in their reports.In recent years,in local news reports such as the Tianjin Port explosion accident and the Qingdao petroleum pipeline explosion accident,the local media have shown strong local reporting preferences,that is,by avoiding reporting at the first time and spinning relevant news afterwards,the local media report the actual negative news events in a positive way.In the field of reporting on listed companies,does China’s local media also exhibit such biases in reporting based on local preferences,giving more positive slant to reports on local listed companies? Based on the data reported by local media in China from January 2010 to December 2018 and the data of listed companies in China during this period,this article conducts an empirical study on this issue,and draws the following conclusions:(1)China’s local media exhibit reporting bias in their reports on listed companies.Specifically,compared with reports on non-local listed companies,local media have more positive reports on listed companies in the same province(city,autonomous region).(2)Bias in reporting of listed companies by local media in China exists only in the sample of private companies and local state-owned companies.For central stateowned companies that are not under the jurisdiction of local governments,local media have not shown local preferences based on similar geographic locations.(3)The local government’s intervention in the local media is one of the important reasons for the bias of local media reports.The greater the local government’s intervention in the local media,the greater the bias of local media’s reporting on listed companies.(4)After controlling the reporting slant of eight representative national media,the positive reporting slant of local media in China can further improve the corporate performance of the reported listed companies,but this promotion effect only exists in the reporting year and next year,this effect disappeared in the second year after the report,indicating that the impact of local media reporting bias on the performance of listed companies was short-term effective.Based on the conclusions of this study,this article proposes the following policy recommendations:(1)For local media,it is necessary to avoid a one-sizefits-all approach adopts a positive publicity reporting model for all news.In reporting on the news of listed companies,local media should take a responsible attitude towards consumers and investors,and actively take advantage of professional advantages to disclose important news information of local listed companies in order to protect consumers and investors from making consumption and investment decisions misled by biased information.(2)For local governments,in addition to ideological propaganda work,local governments should appropriately transfer the right of independent reporting to local media,reduce local government intervention,and ensure that local media are objective and fair in the process of news production and reporting,in order to create a good information circulation environment for the relevant parties of the listed company and facilitate the transformation and development of local media in market-oriented reforms.(3)For listed companies,it is necessary to pay attention to the positive effects of media positive publicity and negative reports on themselves.In the daily business process,the listed companies must strictly control all aspects of production management to avoid the occurrence of negative events that affect the company’s media image.At the same time,listed companies must face up to the problems pointed out in the negative media reports and take the initiative to correct them in a timely manner.On the one hand,it improves the corporate governance and management level,and on the other hand,it establishes a positive image of correcting mistakes in front of the public,and avoids the continuous fermentation of negative news.The research in this paper has the following innovations:(1)The domestic research on media reporting bias is mainly focused on the reports of several national financial and economic media.Some scholars have also conducted research from the perspective of online new media.But corresponding empirical studies are lacking at the local media coverage level.This paper takes the data of nearly one million reports from local media in China as the sample of this study to confirm that there is a reporting bias in the reporting of listed companies by local media in China,and further strengthens the relevant research system in the field of media reporting bias in China.(2)The research in this paper finds that local government intervention is an important cause of bias in local media reports in China.Although many scholars have studied the impact of government intervention on media reporting behaviors,the relevant literature mainly focuses on government intervention in political reporting.The results of this study show that government intervention can also be used in non-political reporting areas such as reporting on listed companies,which broadening the research path for government intervention in the media.In addition,in terms of the formation mechanism of local media’s reporting bias to listed companies,foreign studies have concluded that marketization factors such as advertising costs are the cause of local media’s biased reporting,but the rusult of this paper shows that it comes from the non-marketization factor of government intervention. |
