Media legitimacy and corporate environmental communication

Abstract

Using a direct measure of environmental legitimacy, we explore the impact of annual report environmental disclosures and environmental press releases as legitimation tools. The sample comprises North American firms (Canada and the United States). The results obtained show that environmental legitimacy is significantly and positively affected by the quality of the economic-based segments of annual report environmental disclosures and by reactive environmental press releases, but not by proactive press releases. Moreover, our results suggest that negative media legitimacy is a driver of environmental press releases but not of annual report environmental disclosures.