The editor of Russia's best known daily, Izvestiya, was sacked yesterday, two days after the newspaper carried strong criticism of the government's handling of the Beslan tragedy.
Raf Shakirov lost his job after the paper questioned the fact that officials claimed the number of hostages was only 350, reported that parents of the hostages entered the school ahead of the security forces, and published a column denouncing the censored coverage by state TV.
Under the headline "The Silence of the State Broadcasters", writer Irina Petrovskaya said the state channels panicked when the shooting started, and failed to give live coverage like CNN, BBC and the independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy. She said they had to wait for instructions.
NTV, the only national channel which was independent when President Putin came to power, was taken over by the state four years ago. It was reporting live when the shooting started at 1 p.m. local time on Friday. The channel quickly switched to prerecorded material. It went back to its reporters 30 minutes later, and gave three hours of live coverage.
The two main state channels waited until 2 p.m. before broadcasting an edited 10-minute bulletin from Beslan.
Two of Russia's leading journalists with independent views on Chechnya were not even able to get to Beslan.
Andrei Babitsky, of Radio Liberty, was arrested at Moscow's Vnukovo airport on Thursday and stopped from flying south as police searched his bag for explosives. After they had finished, strangers came up and started a scuffle. Mr Babitsky was later charged with "hooliganism". He was jailed for five days.
Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta who received death threats over Chechnya, was taken ill on a plane from Vnukovo to Rostov after drinking tea.
Doctors said she was poisoned.