The manipulation problem in the media has been still pressing. Processes and
techniques intended for making an influence on public opinion and behaviors are
in ongoing improvement, making it difficult to access an objective image of the
world. Therefore, this research aims at emphasizing the importance of speech
(language) means that form a basis of manipulations in mass communications. To
achieve this, authors have provided the systematization of social influence
processes in the media and made techniques and means of speech influence
clearer. Authors provided a content analysis of texts of 2018 from the media using
news resources of different countries (‘Russia Today,’ ‘RIA Novosti,’ ‘Ukrinform’
and ‘Fox News Channel’) as an example. The research subject consists of news
materials of a politico-social nature on Russia’s participation in the Syrian conflict.
Authors have empirically revealed a clear desire to influence readers of the media
resources using covert means of the manipulative influence. In total, they have
found five types of manipulative speech influence in texts of the media. There are
self-presentation, semantic speech strategies, persuasive strategies, hit piece
and information manipulation. A lexical toolkit of speech manipulation includes
euphemisms, dysphemisms, slogan words, speech metaphorization, etc. Media
texts have become more and more complicated as they contain hints, precedent
phenomena, irony, as well as metamessages of informative presentation. Each
media of the selected ones more or less uses means of speech manipulation in
varying degrees. Applications of such methods of influence (in number) almost
directly depend on a political attitude towards an object.