ABSTRACT
Unlike other parts of the book, this chapter addresses not only practices of various agents trying to change the media product, but the product itself as well.1 My main goal here is to show how the actual story of the two Chechen wars was transformed into a specific media discourse by deliberate actions of key players (especially of the state agents), as well as by the structural inclination of news as a media format to present wars as “an occasional series of unlinked reports about seemingly unrelated crises” (McNulty 1999: 270). A rigorous approach to such a goal would require the significant expansion of the theoretical approach used before, for which this final chapter is not a place – rather, it is written to illustrate a direction in which the research may be extended and in which, perhaps, new insights may be expected. Therefore, this text is closer to expert analysis: the terms “the actual story” and “the coverage” are problematic both conceptually and in terms of available sources. However, the conclusions presented here are not just a private opinion: they are based on longterm observation of the Russian media, and on multiple secondary sources. “The coverage” component is the most available and verifiable, and it has been most widely studied.
