From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

In the throes of the Bessalon school hostage catastrophe last week, the Russian government reverted to the standard procedure employed in previous crises.

From the sinking of the submarine Kursk to the deadly 2002 theater siege to the recent terrorist downing of two airliners.

It lied.

But is it possible that the latest embarrassment, which met with harsh criticism even on a Kremlin-controlled TV channel,

will finally coax the government into being more honest with its people?

Is it possible that in his vesty a front page consisting only of a harrowing photograph,

a man carrying a wounded Bessalon school pupil,

he speaks an end to the reflexive suppression of bad news?

Fred Weir, Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor,

believes he can answer those questions,

and the answer is no. On the whole, Russian TV was pretty tame. During the crisis, they reported exactly what they were meant to. They repeated uncritically what they were told, and there

hasn't been any really loud or consistent backlash from them.

The print media is a bit different and showed a little bit of spirit in the last few days.

After having been fed such a diet of fibs and cover-ups last week,

what that shows is that the Russian media isn't completely straight-jacketed,

that there are possibilities to express itself.

But the aftermath of this hostage crisis, I think,

shows that the Kremlin is extending its control to the print media.

I guess we should note that Raf Shakirov, the editor-in-chief of Izvestia,

lost his job a few days ago because of his coverage of the crisis.

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