A senior journalist at CCTV said Saturday that colleagues had told him in the morning that they had been ordered to remove content related to Mr. Rui from the network’s website and to scrap on-air advertisements featuring him and his show.

Image Rui Chenggang, a popular host of a financial news program on China Central Television. Credit... Eric Piermont/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Rui is the most well-known celebrity to have been ensnared in a broad anticorruption campaign being overseen by President Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi, who is also the leader of the Communist Party, has said the party has been weakened by lack of discipline among its more than 80 million members. Last month, the party announced that Xu Caihou, a former top general, was being stripped of party membership and handed over to investigators looking into allegations of corrupt practices, including the selling of military posts. Mr. Xu’s purge was the biggest one in the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army in many years.

Fluent in English and partial to Zegna suits, Mr. Rui, who is in his mid-30s, has been heralded by fans as the face of modern China’s aspirations. A biography on a CCTV English-language website said Mr. Rui had interviewed more than 30 heads of state and more than 300 top executives of Fortune 500 companies. The biography said that in 2005, Richard C. Levin, then the president of Yale University, nominated Mr. Rui to be a Yale World Fellow. Mr. Levin wrote in an introduction to one of Mr. Rui’s books, “Life Begins at 30,” on China’s economic rise, that he was “an energetic young standard-bearer of the New China.”

Critics of Mr. Rui have long denounced him for his nationalistic campaigns and outrageous, confrontational statements. Mr. Rui achieved widespread fame in 2007 when he used his blog to successfully start a populist campaign to compel the government to remove a Starbucks coffeehouse from the historic Forbidden City in Beijing. A Chinese cafe replaced it. In 2010, Mr. Rui became the subject of Internet mockery over a comment he made when President Obama called for questions from the Korean news media at a Group of 20 summit meeting in South Korea. “I’m actually Chinese, but I think I get to represent the entire Asia,” he said.

The next year, at the World Economic Forum in Dalian, China, Mr. Rui asked Gary Locke, then the United States ambassador: “I hear you flew here coach. Is that a reminder that U.S. owes China money?” Mr. Locke replied that it was standard practice for American diplomats and other American officials to fly in economy class.