The purpose of this analysis is to establish the directions of influences between newspaper coverage and public opinion in Russia. The newly political developments made researchers question the existence of pluralism of opinions and freedom of press in the Russian Federation, taking into account an unconventional approach to political reforms of the president Vladimir Putin. The analysis compares both the public opinion and the newspaper coverage of the four prominent Russian political figures, Vladimir Putin, Gennady Zuganov, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Grigory Yavlinsky. The method employed in this paper is time series analysis, namely vector autoregression with Granger causality tests. It allows incorporating both dependent and independent variables with their several lags to test for direction of causality. The study explores causal relationships between two media variables (coverage in a government-oriented newspaper, Izvestia, and a more liberal, business-oriented paper, Kommersant) and two public opinion ones (approval and informational ratings). There is no clear indication of the governmental newspaper's pressure over the business-oriented paper or the public opinion; there are only few indications of Putin's variables directly influencing the coverage or the public opinion of the other opposition leaders.