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INTRODUCTION
The function of media relations is often part of the strategy that organizations use for building their reputations (Sheafer, 2001; Yoon, 2005). As previous media research has revealed, the news media are one of the primary ways that the public learns about organizations, their activities and their connections to matters of public interest (Deephouse, 2000; Dutton and Dukerich, 1991). Media research on organizations' media relations efforts and the news media's influence on corporate reputation includes organizations' attempts to work through the news media to convey their points of view, but also the salience of news coverage about organizations on the salience of these firms. The predominant theoretical framework for media research applied to organizations has been agenda-setting theory (Carroll and McCombs, 2003).
Carroll and McCombs (2003) used agenda-setting theory as a conceptual framework applied to organizations for examining how media visibility and media favorability influence the prominence of firms, their attributes and the evaluation of firms and their attributes. The first level of agenda-setting explains how the volume of reports the news media devote to firms (called media visibility) influences the public's perceptions of which firms are the most prominent. The second level of agenda-setting applied to organizations suggests that the salience of attributes described in the context of firms relates to the public's perceptions that those attributes are the most important attributes to know about for those firms.
Thus far, the findings for agenda-setting applied to organizations' news coverage have been somewhat mixed. For instance, Meijer and Kleinnijenhuis (2006) found support for how these media portrayals of these substantive attributes influenced firms' reputations, while Kiousis et al. (2007) found mild support for only some attributes. Carroll (2004) found that the amount of media coverage on certain attributes of a company (eg, executive performance and workplace environment) but not others (eg, financial performance, products and services or social responsibility) corresponded to the use of these attributes by the survey respondents. These results provide some indication that media effects on corporate reputation are not uniform and vary in context and degree. Thus, the question becomes under what conditions do the news media influence the public's perceptions of corporate reputation?
One explanation lies in the differentiated information needs and interests of corporate stakeholders who evaluate the...