Between January 2018 and March 2021, Channel 1, Russia’s leading TV channel broadcasted approximately 1100 stories on protest. 95% of them covered events taking place abroad. While Russian media are not alone in emphasizing foreign, as opposed to domestic protests, the decision to highlight citizen activism appears puzzling. Why do authoritarian media stress the grievances and size of crowds demonstrating abroad when doing so may motivate citizens to take to the streets at home? To gain traction on this question we combine protest-event data from datasets that jointly cover protest world-wide (ACLED, MMAD, LAruPED) and evidence from 10 years of protest coverage on Russian TV. We explore what factors predict the probability that any given protest would receive coverage and how protest characteristics shape the framing of events. We find that the coverage of foreign protests corresponds to a domestic agenda – with violent foreign protests receiving greater, and more hostile, coverage around periods of domestic unrest or in the lead-up to electoral races. Findings, which speak to recent research on authoritarian propaganda, have implications for scholarship on preventive protest management and authoritarian resilience.