With the rise of the ESG sustainability concept, the media has played a crucial role in assisting firms in strengthening their ESG implementation. Media focus on ESG may offer a fresh approach to governance, thereby fostering the resilience of the industrial chain and the sustainable development of the supply chain. This paper employs Python software to scrape ESG-related news articles from the Baidu news portal. By integrating machine learning and text analysis methods, it quantifies the media focus on ESG of China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2021, and investigates how this focus affects supply-chain configuration. The findings indicate that media focus on ESG significantly motivates firms to diversify their supply chain, adopting a more networking configuration, and this effect is predominantly evident in the social aspect of ESG coverage. Mechanism testing demonstrates that media focus on ESG reduces supply-chain concentration and encourages a more distributed supply chain by easing financing constraints, mitigating principal-agent conflicts, and bolstering corporate reputation. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that media focus on ESG has a more pronounced effect on firms with lower executive ownership, smaller credit size, higher rating uncertainty, fewer ESG investors, and in areas with stronger urban ESG governance. This paper sheds light on how media focus on ESG affects supply-chain development, providing valuable theoretical insights for China’s ongoing ESG implementation and efforts to maintain the security of its industrial and supply chains.