[7][8] Before the 1999 Duma elections, the program worked against the leaders of the Fatherland - All Russia bloc, Yury Luzhkov, then mayor of Moscow, and Yevgeny Primakov.

[13][14] On 2 September 2000, Dorenko's program criticized the government's handling of the sinking of the Kursk submarine based on materials from a business trip to the Vidyayevo garrison.

According to BBC News, Dorenko told the Echo of Moscow radio at the time that on 29 August the president proposed that I join his team, as he put it, and stay at Channel 1 to be his favourite and best-loved journalist.

[17]The director of the ORT network, Konstantin Ernst, insisted that contrary to Dorenko's allegations, the government had not been involved in the change and that he made the decision to cancel the show because Dorenko had refused to stop discussing the government's plan to nationalize media magnate Boris Berezovsky's 49% stake in the network.

In the current situation, I asked the presenter S. Dorenko in today's episode of his author's program to refrain from commenting on the conflict between public and private shareholders of Public Russian Television, since the emotional intensity of the situation poses a threat to the normal work of ORT.Following this incident, Dorenko became a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin's rule and did not work for Russian television again.

[15] On 7 September 2000, Boris Berezovsky transferred his controllable stake in ORT to journalists and representatives of the creative intelligentsia, including Dorenko.

Despite the program's closure, until 31 January 2001, Dorenko was listed as deputy general director of ORT until he was fired due to the "expiration of the contract.

[23] A distinctive feature of the program in the new format was the dialogue between Dorenko and the townspeople who gathered in one of the city squares at a free microphone (in live mode).

Therefore, Dorenko, as a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation,[30] was de jure considered not an employee but a guest,[31] a participant in such programs as "Minority Opinion" and "Morning Spread".

On 23 May 2007, Dorenko provided the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal with the full videotape of an interview he recorded in April 1998 with Alexander Litvinenko and fellow FSB employees, where the agents appeared to confess that their bosses had ordered them to kill, kidnap or frame prominent Russian politicians and businesspeople, and thus made it publicly available in full for the first time.

[37] On 9 May 2019, Dorenko was riding his Triumph Bonneville motorcycle[38] in the center of Moscow when he began veering into oncoming traffic, reportedly after suffering a cardiac event.