ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Media Discourse Construction of Rural Revitalization Strategy: Thematic Patterns and Sentiment Orientation in People's Daily and CCTV News on Douyin
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universiti Putra Malaysia Fakulti Bahasa Moden Dan Komunikasi, Serdang, Malaysia
- 2Universiti Putra Malaysia Institut Pengajian Sains Sosial, Serdang, Malaysia
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This study examines how Chinese state media organizations adjust their communication strategies on short video platforms when reporting on national policy initiatives. Focusing on the rural revitalization strategy, we analyze how two well-known traditional media outlets, People's Daily and CCTV News, shape digital discourse on Douyin. We extract topic patterns and sentiment orientations from 445 rural revitalization videos using a computational approach combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and StructBERT sentiment analysis. The results reveal different digital communication strategies: People's Daily is dominated by positive emotions on all topics, while CCTV News adopts a more differentiated sentiment design, especially when dealing with poverty alleviation and rural livelihood issues. These results show how institutional identity influences digital storytelling strategies. The party newspaper (People's Daily) focuses on ideological reinforcement, while the State Television Station (CCTV) strikes a balance between promoting political content and emotional resonance. This study contributes to the understanding of how traditional news organizations can exploit opportunities on specific platforms while maintaining their institutional role in the digital environment. Keywords: Rural Revitalization, LDA Model, BERT Sentiment Analysis, Digital Media Discourse, Framing Theory
Keywords: BERT Sentiment Analysis, digital media discourse, framing theory, LDA model, Rural revitalization
Received: 22 Sep 2025; Accepted: 09 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Xu, Mahamed and Sha'ri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xinhu Xu
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