In recent years, the income gap between regions and between urban and rural areas has widened, making it difficult to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency, while common prosperity is the essential requirement of socialism and an epochal feature of modernization. In the report of the 20th National Congress of CPC, the third distribution was once again included in the basic institutional arrangements, as an important force to promote common prosperity, highlighting the importance of promoting the third distribution to promote common prosperity. Charitable donations, as a form of public welfare for the third distribution to promote common prosperity, have become an important manifestation of enterprises’ active fulfillment of social responsibility. With the rapid development of information technology, media coverage plays an increasingly important role in modern philanthropy. However, there is little in-depth discussion on the mechanism of charitable donation promoting corporate performance through media reports in the existing literature, and there is a lack of relevant empirical analysis. Based on the data of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies from 2003 to 2020, this paper reveals the impact and mechanism of charitable donation on corporate performance from the perspective of media reports. The research finds that: charitable donation attracts the media’s attention to the enterprise, and the positive media reports, original news, and newspaper media play a stronger focusing effect and magnification effect, which quickly improve the visibility and reputation of the enterprise and significantly promote the improvement of enterprise performance. Further examination shows that the profitability and donation scale of enterprises have an obvious halo effect, while the external environment has a significant marketization effect. Compared with the existing literature, this paper discusses the economic consequences of corporate charitable donations from the perspective of media attention, and provides empirical evidence for correctly understanding the function and role of media in modern philanthropy and promoting news media to better serve the development of philanthropy. The study is carried out along the logic of charitable donation → media reports → corporate performance → corporate sustainable development to test whether media coverage has a mediating effect on corporate business development, and further explore the extent to which different tendencies and types of media coverage affect corporate business development, so as to provide a reference for properly guiding corporations to fulfill their social responsibility, improve public opinion guidance and business environment, and promote sustainable corporate goodness. In addition, this study has strong practical value and also has certain policy implications for China to deepen the reform of income distribution and encourage enterprises to participate in the three distributions to achieve common prosperity. The results of this paper show that corporate giving back to society also helps to achieve its benign development, providing empirical evidence to advocate corporate social responsibility and media mission. Therefore, it is necessary to accelerate the improvement of the legal and policy system for charitable donations, guide more enterprises to participate in charitable causes by jointly creating a good donation system environment, and give play to the supervision function and intermediary effect of the media, actively create a social atmosphere of worship and kindness, and encourage enterprises to actively participate in charity and bravely shoulder social responsibilities to promote common prosperity.