Who sets the corporate social responsibility agenda in the news media? Unveiling the agenda-building process of corporations and a monitoring group

This study explores the roles of corporations and a monitoring group in building the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda in the news media. Using agenda-building theory as a theoretical framework, we content analyzed 7672 press releases from 223 U.S. corporations and 1064 news articles covering those corporations from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and investigated the relationships among press releases, news articles related to the corporations, and the ratings of those corporations by KLD Research and Analytics, Inc., a corporate social performance monitoring group. The results showed stronger relationships between the KLD ratings and the news media coverage than between the press releases and the news media coverage at the first level of the CSR agenda, but there were variations at the second level of the CSR agenda. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.