Impact of Media Coverage on Corporate GreenwashingMediating Role of Executive Characteristics and Internal Supervision

Employing a data set of A-share listed companies that published social responsibility reports for five consecutive years from 2014 to 2018, in this paper, a single and chain mediation model was constructed and a Bootstrap method was used to empirically examine the mechanism and path of influence of media coverage on corporate greenwashing behavior for 5000 times based on internal governance perspective. The results show that both external regulation and executive characteristics represented by media coverage and internal governance represented by internal supervision have a direct inhibitory effect on greenwashing behavior, while internal governance has a masking effect: when negative environmental coverage is generated, companies adjust the structure of their executive team and the level of internal supervision to weaken the impact of external media, resulting in a chain transmission path of “negative publicity-executive team adjustment-weakened internal supervision-weakened governance of greenwashing”, indicating that the internal and external “synergistic” governance of corporate greenwashing is ineffective. In this regard, while improving the media governance system, the authorities should also focus on the “double-sidedness” of internal governance, so as to optimize the disincentive mechanism for corporate greenwashing through internal and external linkages.