Media Report,Earnings Management And Accounting Conservatism

Along with the continuous innovation and development of information technology,the rise of the media has had a dramatic impact on socio-economic and organisational behaviour.As an important information broker and external monitoring force,media coverage influences management’s corporate governance behaviour through administrative,reputational and market pressure mechanisms,and plays an effective role in improving corporate governance and the quality of financial reporting.High-quality financial reporting emphasises the application of the principle of accounting robustness,and robust accounting information in financial reporting helps to reduce information asymmetry and improve corporate governance,therefore,the starting point of this paper is to explore the relationship between media coverage and accounting robustness.Surplus management has been a hot topic of academic research and an area of corporate governance focus.Media coverage,as an external monitoring force,can create market pressure on management,which can lead to different degrees of surplus manipulation and affect the quality of a company’s external disclosure.Meanwhile,surplus management is not only affected by media coverage,but also affects the robustness of corporate accounting as an important dimension to measure the quality of corporate surplus.Therefore,this paper focuses on whether surplus management plays a mediating role in the relationship between media coverage and accounting soundness,and thus develops the whole paper.This paper uses principal-agent theory,effective monitoring hypothesis,information misalignment theory,stakeholder theory and market pressure hypothesis as the theoretical support for the research hypothesis,and uses Python to collect news reports on 229 companies listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange A-share during 2019-2021 from five authoritative financial media above Weibo,and finally obtains 5540 sets of company sample data.This paper first analyses the impact of media coverage on accounting robustness,the impact of media coverage on surplus management,and on this basis introduces the theory of intermediary effect to further investigate the intermediary role of surplus management in the relationship between media coverage and accounting robustness.After theoretical analysis and empirical research,this paper concludes that negative media coverage can improve the level of accounting robustness of companies,the media enhances the supervision of companies’ operating behaviour and accounting information compliance through its information disclosure function,increasing the cost of non-compliance of companies’ operation,and management will be more inclined to disclose information to the public more robustly out of consideration of their own interests as well as the company’s interests;at the same time,it verifies that Under the market pressure hypothesis,management will adopt more surplus management behaviours to meet market expectations due to capital market performance motives,and media coverage will promote management’s surplus management behaviours,and further verify that true surplus management plays a part in mediating the relationship between media coverage and accounting soundness.