The paper analyzes the role of the media and “new media” in political conflicts, and presents the author’s view of the problem. The author emphasizes that the influence of the media and “new media” on the conflicts is significant: any political conflict, regardless of its scale and composition of participants, is inscribed in a specific information context. The struggle of the parties of the conflict for power is always accompanied by an information war with huge involvement of mass-media. The article concludes that in contemporary conflicts the mass media and “new media” perform different roles. They are simultaneously a special subject, an instrument and a channel for conflict interaction.

media, “new media”, Web 2.0, political conflict, political process, manipulation, information wars

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