Using manually collected data of Chinese initial public offering (IPO) firms, this study examines how social connections between executives of media and firms affect IPO pricing. We find that media-connected firms receive more media coverage than their unconnected peers, and the tones of their coverage are also more positive, resulting in less IPO underpricing. However, we find that media-connected firms have worse post-IPO market performance. Although media-connected firms have better pre-IPO accounting performance than their unconnected peers, they conduct more earnings management under the cover of their connected media. Our additional results show that the negative effect of media connections on IPO underpricing is more pronounced for regionally and locally connected media, in non-state-owned enterprises, and firms with less institutional ownership. Our results are robust to alternative proxies for IPO underpricing, matching analysis, instrumental variable analysis, and placebo tests. Collectively, our findings suggest that media connections compromise IPO pricing efficiency.