MOSCOW, Sept 7 (AFP) - News management is a game President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin learned quickly and demonstrated to perfection during last week's school hostage crisis, when the world was better informed than most Russians.
A dramatic example came on September 3 when the West watched in horror as naked children ran for their lives out of a burning school amid gunfire, explosions and screams of agony, and Russians were glued to an entertainment program.
"Russian television reporters were working while looking over their shoulder" at the Kremlin and their editors, said Oleg Panfilov of the Center of Extreme Journalism in Moscow.
"I think Russians received about a tenth of the information out there."
When he inherited the helterskelter world of Boris Yeltsin, Putin quickly introduced a tight media ship. It focuses on Kremlin policies and not the war in Chechnya, selectively meting out information to reporters who are eager to please.
He has placed Western journalists on the perimeter, releasing most news in tightly measured statements to Russian agencies which are then rebroadcast on television and largely parroted in the foreign press.
Putin's every protocol meeting with a state bureaucrat is top news and is almost always given by the media ahead of major world events.
"We are a presidential channel," a top Channel One executive told a Western reporter.
And the system has worked magic. Putin's popularity has soared to nearly 80 percent and has stayed there for about five years, with Russians revelling in their president while grumbling about local authorities and poor standards of living.
A similar policy is followed by many media-savvy Western governments. But watchdogs fear that in Russia it has reached a new and disturbing extreme, a whiff of Soviet practices blowing over a media that was brash and bubbling with enthusiasm in the Yeltsin era.
The attitude to coverage of Beslan particularly shocked media watchdogs.
Several prominent Russian reporters critical of the Chechen war were barred from the scene and two journalists from Georgia -- which has strained relations with Russia -- were arrested on September 3. Four days later, they are still in custody.
During the heart-wrenching six-hour security services' raid in Beslan, in which at least 335 people -- half of them children -- died, Western media networks were using Russian television feeds which the latter were not authorized to air at home.
The moment a bomb went off inside the school, NTV television -- Russia's last independent station before it came under the control of state-run giant Gazprom -- cut off its broadcast from Beslan.
"We urge you to ensure that journalists can carry out their work without hindrance, especially in this critical and tragic time when the population has the right to full, impartial and independent information," international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a letter to the Russian interior ministry.
The only outstanding question to observers in Russia is whether the media is still receiving orders from the Kremlin or has become so intimidated by the powerful president and his team that self-censorship is now instinctive.
"It is both self-censorship, censorship by the editors and censorship by the owners," Panfilov said.
This appeared to be the case with the respected editor of the seminal Izvestia daily, fired for "emotional" coverage by his boss, a holding company controlled by a tycoon who has been extremely keen to preserve good ties with Putin.
"The president no longer has to give any directives, the journalists are doing it themselves," said Panfilov.
And despite persistent criticism of this approach in the West, Putin's KGB training "keeps him determined to keep to his own line", he added.
The main goal of this entire policy may have been to introduce a sense of law and order, perhaps a false sense of security which Russians tired of tumult yearn for and are eager to accept.
"Russians no longer have ways of putting public pressure on Putin. This is a managed world," said Mark Urnov, an analyst at the Expertise Foundation research institute.
"All that is left is a small group of newspapers that are never read and analysts who are never heard," Urnov said.
"Television is now serving a different goal," he said -- that of propaganda.
And many pointed as the defining example to a stark advert run by the television networks urging people to take part Tuesday in an anti-terrorism demonstration backed by the Kremlin.
They did not identify its sponsor but most pointed the finger at the state. More than 100,000 people showed up.