This paper empirically investigates the corporate governance role of the media on CEO compensation contracts and the motivation of media coverage within the context of the transitional China. After carefully reading 17 621 media coverages on CEO compensation, we document that negative media coverage is motivated by both the information demand and entertainment demand of news consumers. On the one hand, media exposures can target CEOs’excessive pay rather than their total pay of public companies as a whole to provide reliable information to their audience; on the other hand, with regard to the state-owned enterprises ( SOEs) ，negative media coverage, however, focuses on the compensation gap between CEOs and average employees, and CEOs’total pay instead of their excessive pay to provide sensational information. When news media provides reliable information，public companies as a whole tend to redress their compensation policy, when media supplies sensational information, SOEs also partially remedy their CEO compensation contracts, which indicates that media plays a positive corporate governance role in the transitional China. Our paper extends our knowledge about alternatives of legal mechanisms in corporate governance by investigating the corporate governance role of the media on CEO compensation, provides new perspectives about CEO compensation practices in the transitional economies，and supplements the literature by examining the motivation of media coverage．