s’
(Pollock and Rindova, 2003: 631), or informationmiddlemen (e.g., Bigalaiser, 1993), procuring andassembling information for sale to their audiences.On this account, media organizations are essentiallybrokers competing in a market for financialinformation, deploying specialized resourcesto collect, assemble, market, and sell informationon business-related issues. Success in the marketfor financial information is presumably basedon the quality of the goods—i.e., informationthat leads to investments that generate returns. Toconsistently publish unreliable information wouldlead readers relying on that information to makeunprofitable investments, thus risking the publication’sown valuable reputation and sending readersto alternative informationproviders. Added tothis market discipline are journalists’ professionalnorms to ‘record thoroughly important events,issues, and opinions about them for the public’
(Deephouse, 2000: 1095).
In the context of corporate governance, thepress brokers information on boards of directors’legal fiduciary responsibility to protect stockholdersfrom managerial abuses. Most theoriesof corporate governance, even including competingviews such as managerialism and agency theory,accept that at least some agency costs areinevitable, and there will be variance in boards’effectiveness in managing those costs, to the extentthat boards are not culpable themselves. Avigilantfinancial press may act as one check againstabuses by managers and/or directors, by investigatingand reporting on governance matters, enablinginformed investment decisions. The informationbrokering role is fulfilled by the Business Weekstories in the sense that data from numerous andvaried sources, including sources not previouslypublicly available are gathered, analyzed, and presentedto readers.
Legitimacy is a focus of the social constructivistperspective (e.g., Pollock and Rindova, 2003;Deephouse, 2000; Zuckerman, 1999; Lamertz and
Baum, 1998), and the financial press can play anactive role in both creating and applying the standardsthat define legitimacy. In the context of corporategovernance, there is uncertainty even in the
academic world about what constitutes appropriateroles, actions, and attributes of boards of directors
(e.g., Westphal, 1999; Johnson, Daily, andEllstrand, 1996), uncertainty that extends into theinvestor community. Investors’ understanding of
what constitutes acceptable corporate governancepractices may be grounded in a variety of sources,including the financial press.
The degree and kind of media coverage givento a firm sends signals to investors over and abovethe information being reported. By selecting specificissues and firms to report on from an unlimitedarray of choices, the press ‘sets the agenda’(McCombs, 1992) for the public, implicitly identifyingwhich issues and firms are important. Simply
being included in media reports may confera certain degree of legitimacy to firms (Zuckerman,1999), but the tenor of the story may also
contribute or detract from legitimacy (Pollock andRindova, 2003). The process tends toward nonrecursionas media coverage begets public interest,which begets additional media coverage. Themedia may further influence legitimacy by quotingor citing experts or reporting on the actionsof respected managers or professionals, many ofwhom had a vested interested in the governanceof the firms they rated, providing ‘social proof’ ofthe legitimacy of a company or practice (e
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