  Amidst growing concern over media manipulation, NLP attention has focused on
overt strategies like censorship and "fake news'". Here, we draw on two
concepts from the political science literature to explore subtler strategies
for government media manipulation: agenda-setting (selecting what topics to
cover) and framing (deciding how topics are covered). We analyze 13 years (100K
articles) of the Russian newspaper Izvestia and identify a strategy of
distraction: articles mention the U.S. more frequently in the month directly
following an economic downturn in Russia. We introduce embedding-based methods
for cross-lingually projecting English frames to Russian, and discover that
these articles emphasize U.S. moral failings and threats to the U.S. Our work
offers new ways to identify subtle media manipulation strategies at the
intersection of agenda-setting and framing.
