Making Virtue Visible: Moral Exemplars and Narrative Governance in Xinwen Lianbo (2025)

This study examines how China,s flagship evening newscast constructs a politically meaning- ful “good person” (moral exemplar) through character-centered reports in 2025. Conceptually, we propose moral agenda-setting as a production-side process that links (a) governance-relevant issue salience, (b) virtue-attribute salience (second-level agenda setting), and (c) narrative and institutional devices that render virtue both imitable and legible as system capacity. Empir- ically, we compile a full-year corpus of Xinwen Lianbo character reports drawn from CCTV, s verbatim transcripts (2025-01-01 to 2025-12-31) and identify 38 reports that meet explicit inclusion criteria. We conduct a systematic textual analysis—combining structured coding with interpretive close reading—to examine issue domains, virtue attributes, authority-endorsement cues (genre labels, organizational positioning, and institutional “proof devices” such as proce- dures and metrics), and recurring narrative templates. The findings show that moral exemplars are constructed less as individualized morality and more as role-based virtue packages embed- ded in organizational arrangements, where quantified performance and standardized procedures function as legitimacy cues. We discuss how this genre translates abstract values into actionable scripts while aligning everyday virtue with governance rationales, ofering a replicable frame- work for studying moral communication in authoritative news systems. We position moral agenda-setting as a genre-based mechanism of production-side agenda-building.