This article combines entrepreneurs’ trust in official media with corporate innovation, analyzes the impact of private entrepreneurs’ official media trust on corporate R&D investment from the perspective of attention, and further examines the moderating role of entrepreneurs’ overseas experience and political status. The 4125 private enterprises in the 2014 National Private Enterprise Sampling Survey are used as the analysis objects, and the theoretical logic of this article is empirically tested. The results show that the trust of entrepreneurs in official media is positively correlated with corporate R&D investment, that is, the higher the level of trust of private entrepreneurs in official media, the more R&D investment enterprises make. Further research shows that the influence of entrepreneurs’ official media trust on innovation investment is not homogeneous, because entrepreneurs’ overseas experience and self-perceived political status as individual social values are heterogeneous, which has external guidance or constraints on the relationship between entrepreneurs’ official media trust and innovation investment. Among them, the political status of entrepreneurs will strengthen the positive effect of official media trust; while the overseas experience of entrepreneurs will weaken the positive effect. This study may have the following theoretical contributions: First, it analyzes the mystery of the differences in innovation investment of private enterprises and expands the application analysis based on the attention-based view. The previous literature on attention-based perspectives focuses on explaining the attention-gathering resources of entrepreneurs or managers to obtain information, while ignoring the impact of specific cognitive patterns formed by the unique experience of decision-makers on attention allocation. This article incorporates individual differences into the analysis framework of attention-based views, which enriches the research of attention-based views. Second, we compare the different mechanisms of political identity perception and overseas experience on attention allocation. Decision-makers’ encoding of external information and attention allocation are the key factors that affect their decision-making. Existing research has not strictly distinguished between the two types of roles. In this study, we analyze the different mechanism of the influence of political identity and overseas experience on decision-makers’ attention. The recognition of individual political identity affects the focus of decision-makers on attention coding, while the multi-source information （or conflict） provided by overseas experience mainly affects the dispersion in the allocation process after attention coding. Third, focusing on the unique perspective of official media has enriched research on the causes of private enterprise innovation in transition economies. The mystery of innovation differences in private enterprises has always been the focus of research. Institutional theory, principal-agent theory, upper echelons theory and resource dependence theory have all explained it in multiple dimensions, but rarely from the perspective of official media information.