Mainstream Media Participation in Public Accountability and Enterprise Emission Restraint: Evidence from “Policy Advising on Television”

Public participation is an important third-party force in environmental governance. However, due to the decentralized and fragmented characteristics of public participation in environmental governance, and the obvious power asymmetry between public participation and local governments, the effect of public participation in environmental governance is limited. From the perspective of expanding the influence of public participation in environmental governance, this paper introduces a quasi-natural experiment on the promotion of “policy advising on television” programs, and makes use of enterprise micro-database to explore the impact of mainstream media participation in public accountability on enterprise pollution emissions and its mechanism. Furthermore, from the perspective of strengthening program effects, this paper further tests the realization path of improving program quality. The research finds that the promotion of “policy advising on television” programs effectively restricts the pollution emission of enterprises. Among them, promoting enterprises to strengthen environmental governance and forcing enterprises to withdraw are important mechanisms. At the same time, in the high industry competition environment or when the government is facing greater financial pressure, the effect of the promotion of “policy advising on television” to promote the pollution reduction of enterprises is weakened. In addition, the further discussion shows that setting up evaluation mechanism in this kind of program, increasing the broadcast frequency of this kind of program and broadcasting in the prime time of the evening will help to strengthen the effect of this kind of program. The relevant research conclusions of this paper emphasize the importance of mainstream media in the process of public participation in environmental governance, which is a useful supplement to the existing research on public participation in environmental governance, and also provides a certain reference for the government to further improve the environmental governance system from the perspective of a third party.