The article considers the problem of functioning in the language of the media of the Russian explanatory structure. The study is based on the results of studying explanatory sentences in Russian syntactic science, which is reflected in the article as a brief history of their study. The study is based on observations of explanatory constructions in the language of various modern media presented on the Internet. As a starting point, it is argued that in order to solve a problem in a media text, it is necessary to distinguish between the text itself and the paratext, as well as the author’s beginning of the text. The study revealed that the explanatory structure acts as the headings of news texts, subheadings of author columns and interview leads. At the same time, news texts found a special type of speech news, the heading of which is an explanatory structure, and the author’s beginning is mainly verbs of speech. The most significant grammatical result is that the media language not only uses the entire repertoire of explanatory constructions known to the literary language, but also forms a number of spe cial constructions based on the reduction of various elements of the modus proposition and even its whole: these are constructions with a omitted modus predicate of the type “Author about the problem”, “author: replica”, as well as a predicative deliberation with interrogative pronouns like who, where, why, what, it is increasingly used as a heading in a number of pub lications. All these reduced constructions meet the conditions of media communication and genre differentiation of media texts. In addition, it has been shown that important textual and grammatical characteristics of the media text are set in the paratext.