Discursive analysis of news values in headlines posted by the official CCTV News WeChat account

As social media has become central to news dissemination, how Chinese state media construct news values has remained an underexplored issue. This study analyses how CCTV News uses discursive strategies in WeChat headlines. We used discursive news values analysis (DNVA) to examine 218 top-read headlines from 2014–2024. Five dominant news values emerged: personalization, eliteness, negativity, proximity, and positivity. This study extends the DNVA framework to a non-Western context and offers new insights into the interaction between news language and news values in the context of digital news dissemination.