No news is good news? Press coverage and corporate public affairs management

Abstract

Being in the public eye puts pressure on an organization's Public Affairs (PA) function. This study finds that firms more closely covered by the press tend to be more forceful in promoting their own position on social issues (social buffering). Press coverage is not associated with greater corporate efforts to comply with societal expectation (social bridging). Overall, press coverage is weakly associated with lowered perceived corporate public affairs performance. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Coming Clean: The Impact of Environmental Performance and Visibility on Corporate Climate Change Disclosure

“…They found that environmental legitimacy demonstrated a nonlinear relationship with disclosure because companies employed impression management strategies to influence external perceptions. Fourth, the visibility results in this study differ from those found by Meznar and Nigh (1995) and Meznar et al (2006), who did not find significant relationships between visibility and company behavior. Our visibility variables, however, were more extensive in that different types of visibility (general/issue related) and Internet news sources were also incorporated into the visibility measure.…”

“…We totaled the scores for each company and averaged the stories over a 2-year period in order to mitigate the impact of events in 1 year dramatically affecting the scores. Meznar et al (2006) have noted that with the 24-h news cycle, Internet blogs, e-zines, and other electronic information sources, print media coverage alone is a deficient indicator of media visibility. The Google News Archive differs from the general Google search engine in that it crawls stories from web sites including newspaper publishers and aggregators to cover a vast number of issues and perspectives.…”

“…According to Salancik (1979) all else being equal, inconspicuous companies have less immediate need to adapt their behavior because they face less public scrutiny. When an issue affects a large group of companies or an entire industry, the task of resolving the issue may be taken up by a single company or a smaller group of companies, allowing others to be free riders who benefit from issue resolution without the expense of developing the solution (Meznar et al, 2006). As stakeholders take interest in an issue like environmental performance, it is likely that leading companies will seek competitive advantage by acclaiming their performance through increased disclosure.…”

“…Following previous research (Meznar and Nigh, 1995;Meznar et al, 2006), we operationalized the moderating variable, general visibility, as the number of times a company was mentioned in mainstream media such as newspapers. Drawing on Kiousis' (2004) and Zyglidopoulos and Georgiadis (2006), we made two assessments to determine visibility: relevance and prominence.…”

Erratum to: Beyond Acclamations and Excuses: Environmental Performance, Voluntary Environmental Disclosure and the Role of Visibility

“…According to Pfeffer and Salancik (1978), visibility affects the level of outside pressure a firm experiences because stakeholders take greater interest in firms that are visible. Meznar et al (2006) found that press coverage was positively associated with firms' attempts to shape the way outsiders perceived the firm and/or the issue. Stakeholders' demands for compliance create institutional pressures (Maignan and Ferrell, 2001), and the media exacerbate these pressures by focusing public attention on corporate behavior (Chen and Meindl, 1991;Erfle et al, 1990).…”