Series 2, Episode 45: How ideology intersects with media coverage, with Professor Georg Wernicke, HEC Paris

A recent article in the journal Organization Science argues that

“Although prior research attributes news media coverage of firms to the alignment of firm behavior with societal expectations of appropriateness, the appropriateness of firm behavior is judged through an ideological lens. Therefore, the influence of a firm’s behavior on its news media coverage is likely to be contingent on news organizations’ ideology.”

The veracity of this statement has seemingly never been more true than in recent years when the news media has become increasingly polarised along ideological grounds and there would at times appear to be a news outlet to support any view, however mainstream or obscure.

To explore this further I am delighted be joined by one of the co-authors of the paper, Professor Georg Wernicke of HEC Paris.

About our guest…

Georg Wernicke is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Business Policy at HEC Paris. Georg’s research is on topics in, and at the intersection of, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR), broadly defined. More specifically, he is interested in the drivers of public disapproval of firms’ practices, for example the compensation firms pay to their CEOs, how firms’ prosocial activities affect disapproval, and, in turn, which subset of firms and CEOs reacts to being targeted. Georg also analyzes how the characteristics and values of CEOs affect firm level outcomes such as corporate misconduct or the adoption of prosocial practices, as well as how demographic minority status affects labor-market outcomes for directors after occurrences of financial fraud. Furthermore, Georg engages in projects that explore the antecedents of superior firm performance on CSR.

• The article referenced in the discussion is available here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2022.17237
• You can find out more about Georg and his work at his personal page: https://www.georg-wernicke.com/
• Or on his faculty page at HEC Paris: https://www.hec.edu/en/faculty-research/faculty-directory/faculty-member/WERNICKE-Georg

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