Drawing upon Paul Chilton’s (2005) approach to manipulative discourse analysis, this paper looks into how the ideas of risk and blame, as shifted from Yeltsin and his team of ‘reformers’ in the pursuit of restoring Yeltsin’s political credibility, were propagated through the media news management during the presidential election of 1996. By applying the Conceptual Integration or Blending framework (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) to a case study of the Russian news story about an airport strike, the paper reveals how the mass media was manipulated at an almost invisible level, which has not been explored so far. The paper argues that conceptual integration can be successfully used as a core cognitive linguistic research method for elucidating culturally specific and historically changing cognitive frames and analysis of counter-factuality in manipulative news discourse.
