Fit to Print? How Political Bias Affects Media Coverage of Corporate Sociopolitical Activism

Organizational research has largely treated media coverage of firms as insulated from news outlets’ political biases, implicitly assuming that it provides a balanced representation of firm behaviors. However, increasing political polarization and firms’ growing involvement in social and political controversies challenge this assumption by creating greater scope for news outlets’ political orientations to shape business reporting. We explore this possibility by developing a two-stage framework that discerns news outlets’ attention (i.e., what firm behaviors they cover) from their tone (i.e., how they portray those behaviors). We argue that media organizations face two competing pressures: an incentive to cultivate ideological differentiation that appeals to readers and an incentive to maintain credibility that appeals to advertisers. We find that ideological congruence between a news outlet’s political orientation and a firm’s behavior increases the likelihood that the behavior receives coverage but does not influence the evaluative tone of that coverage—a pattern we term bias allocation. Supplemental analyses also reveal ideological asymmetries across left- and right-leaning outlets. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on the media, organizational political ideology, and strategic management.