Wrongdoers or Saviors? CEO Activism, Media Partisanship, and the Media’s Construction of CEO Infamy and Celebrity

This study advances research on social evaluations by theorizing how partisan media construct CEO infamy through dramaturgical logics distinct from those underlying CEO celebrity. Moving beyond conceptualizations of infamy as merely negative celebrity, we argue that infamy emerges through simple melodramatic narratives casting CEOs as wrongdoers, whereas celebrity involves more complex dramatized narratives portraying CEOs as saviors. Focusing on CEOs’ liberal sociopolitical activism—a visible, ideologically-charged action that departs from conventional executive roles—we theorize that this behavior generates divergent constructions in partisan media: infamy in conservative outlets and celebrity in liberal outlets. We further argue that activism more readily generates infamy than celebrity because melodramatic narratives are simpler to construct and negative deviance is more readily perceived than positive deviance. We examine two moderators of these relationships. Firm performance differentially shapes these constructions, with poorer performance intensifying conservative-media infamy and stronger performance amplifying liberal-media celebrity. CEO social media engagement, conversely, attenuates both by constraining traditional media’s narrative discretion and reducing activism’s newsworthiness. We develop an LLM-based annotation system capturing CEO-directed sentiment, role attributions, and dramaturgical narratives in media articles. Analyzing 91,608 articles covering 705 S&P 500 CEOs across 45 ideologically polarized U.S. media outlets between 2016 and 2022, we find broad support for our hypotheses across our main and extensive supplemental analyses. Our findings advance understanding of CEO infamy and social evaluations more generally by revealing how partisan media construct divergent social evaluations of the same executive behavior through distinct narrative processes.