Abstract:Using the exposure of“21st Century News Group”news extortion case as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper examines whether financial media,as an economic subject itself,would conspire with,supervise, or even threaten companies. Based on news reports published before the exposure,companies are classified into three groups: the media-interest-related group,themedia-interest-grabbed group,and the control group. The empirical results demonstrate that when the self-interest behavior of the media was exposed, the market would downgrade the valuation of interest-related firms and upgrade the valuation of interestgrabbed firms,as indicated by the significantly negative market reaction to the former group and significantly positive reaction to the latter. There is a less positive or even negative market reaction to local firms within the interest-grabbed group. It shows that geographically nearer firms are more likely to compromise or“cooperate” with the local media when being threatened.