Of shepherds and sheep: Who sets the agenda for firms' <scp>attention to</scp> social issues?

Abstract Corporate social responsibility has received much attention regarding how it can benefit firms and why firms voluntarily address social issues. However, little is known about the problems to which firms choose to pay attention and what influences these decisions. We combine the attention‐based view of the firm and media agenda‐setting theories to propose that firms address the most prominent social issues as determined by the media. We analyze the frequency of 64 social issues in the CSR reports of 258 firms from 2006 to 2016 for a total sample of 86,208 issue‐firm‐year observations. We find that the salience of the problems in traditional media influences the social issues firms address in their CSR reports, and over time, the agenda‐setting effect of traditional media on firms has increased, solidifying traditional media's role as curators of social issues.