Linguistic features, rhetorical strategies, and framing of CCTV news discourse

The subject of the study is the linguistic features, rhetorical strategies, and frame mechanisms of the news discourse of China Central Television (CCTV) in the period 2022–2025. Particular attention is paid to how linguistic and compositional means participate in shaping the media’s institutional position, in representing events, and in setting certain interpretive frames. The analysis covers traditional broadcast, analytical, and digital formats: the flagship program “新闻联播” (“Xinwen Lianbo”), thematic reports, analytical programs, the explanatory rubric “主播说联播” (“Anchors Talk about Xinwen Lianbo”), as well as short videos and publications on the digital platforms of CCTV and China Media Group. The empirical base consisted of more than 1,500 items. Their comparison was carried out according to a unified analytical scheme that included format and genre, thematic orientation, linguistic features, methods of representing the institutional subject, rhetorical strategies, and the frames used. The research methodology is based on a combination of content analysis, discourse analysis, linguostylistic analysis, and comparative analysis. Content analysis was used for the descriptive recording of the recurrence of features, without applying statistical criteria for hypothesis testing. The theoretical basis was formed by the provisions of media linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and framing theory. Working definitions of frame, rhetorical strategy, and discursive model were refined. The scholarly novelty lies primarily in the systemic correlation of linguistic standardization, institutional subjectivity, rhetorical strategies, and framing, as well as in identifying the cascading nature of framing. It is shown that a single story can successively activate several interrelated frames. It has been established that digital adaptation preserves the basic linguo-rhetorical structure while simultaneously changing the density of presentation, syntactic compression, visualization, and composition of the message. The mechanism of transferring part of the semantic load from the extended television text to headlines, titles, infographics, and visual sequences is described.