Media discourse construction of rural revitalization strategy: thematic patterns and sentiment orientation in People’s Daily and CCTV News on Douyin

Abstract

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.