# Framing and Agenda-setting in Russian News: a Computational Analysis of Intricate Political Strategies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09386/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03514/) (2023)
- [Modeling Framing in Immigration Discourse on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06443/) (2021)
- [Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers' Reactions to News Headlines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08790/) (2021)
- [Heroes, Villains, and Victims, and GPT-3: Automated Extraction of Character Roles Without Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07557/) (2022)
- [Identifying Morality Frames in Political Tweets using Relational Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04535/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Predicting the Factuality and the Bias of News Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12506/) (2021)
- [Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02052/) (2023)
- [To Protect and To Serve? Analyzing Entity-Centric Framing of Police Violence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05325/) (2021)
- [ENTRUST: Argument Reframing with Language Models and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06758/) (2021)
- [Challenges and Opportunities in Information Manipulation Detection: An Examination of Wartime Russian Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12382/) (2022)
- [Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04282/) (2024)
- [Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08829/) (2021)
- [Multi-Modal Framing Analysis of News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20960/) (2025)
- [Framing Unpacked: A Semi-Supervised Interpretable Multi-View Model of Media Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11030/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning for Analyzing Political Campaigns on Facebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10669/) (2022)
- [Towards Few-Shot Identification of Morality Frames using In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02029/) (2023)
- [Connecting the Dots in News Analysis: Bridging the Cross-Disciplinary Disparities in Media Bias and Framing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08069/) (2023)
- [Decoding News Narratives: A Critical Analysis of Large Language Models in Framing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11621/) (2024)
- [EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01715/) (2024)
- [Media Framing through the Lens of Event-Centric Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03151/) (2024)
- [SemEval-2026 Task 6: CLARITY -- Unmasking Political Question Evasions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14027/) (2026)
- [From Hesitancy Framings to Vaccine Hesitancy Profiles: A Journey of Stance, Ontological Commitments and Moral Foundations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09456/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Classification by Logical Reasoning on Natural Language Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03252/) (2022)
- ["A Tale of Two Movements": Identifying and Comparing Perspectives in #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter Movements-related Tweets using Weakly Supervised Graph-based Structured Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07155/) (2023)
- [Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17213/) (2024)
- [Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07400/) (2025)
- [Generalizability of Media Frames: Corpus creation and analysis across countries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16337/) (2025)
- [Retain or Reframe? A Computational Framework for the Analysis of Framing in News Articles and Reader Comments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04612/) (2025)
- [Towards Explaining Subjective Ground of Individuals on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09953/) (2022)
- [All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18827/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.