ИСТИНА

Ten years have passed since religions faced possible challenges in accommodating themselves in Russian media landscape. From historical perspective this is a short time to build concepts and construct theories. From the point of view of a media researcher the period is enough to measure, analyze and understand the news industry from its very start till today’s coverage. The research reported in this paper assumes that even though there has been clear improvement in increasing variety of interrelations the task of religion coverage is far different from being a signal of modernity: • In secular press that is focused to multifaith population there is deformation of attention towards dominant religion and public figures representing them. It seems that the only newsmakers in religious sphere are Patriarch Alexey and other orthodox hierarchies, attention to other religious figures depends on actual events; • The picture of religious life is misrepresented. There are still “gray zones” of coverage, non-focused topics (i.e. transparency of faith groups and organizations budgets); • The list of dominant topics does not include issues of intercultural and interreligious dialogue that seems to be surprising in the light of September, 11th factor; • Different channels present different modes of religious coverage oriented not only to local, parochial or individual scope but national and universal as well; • The situation with mediated religion confirms its inclination to “conservative” models of communication: depersonalized voices, archaic forms, old-fashioned time formats. But in some cases in order to compete with other voices in the public arena it demonstrates the trends of rationalism: dialogue forms suppress monologue, interactive formats appear. The data reported in this paper comes from a complex media research that included three procedures: media mapping, content analysis of secular and religious media (three papers and four radio channels) and in-depth interviewing of experts.