The media interpretation of the ethnic conflict as an act of deontologisation of the ethnic group

The article sets a new perspective for understanding the problems of genocide, which appears not as an ethnic and political, but as a communicative phenomenon. In this sense, the media discourse acquires new content and becomes a factor in the formation and construction of ethnic identity. Themes of interethnic relations and intra-ethnic identity are the material for effective manipulative influence in the mass media. With the help of stereotyping methods and propagandists techniques, the mass media generate in the minds of the audience distorted images, opinions, attitudes concerning certain issues and thus create their own reality. Considerable attention is also paid to the role of the mass media in the self-renewal and preservation of the ethnos «collective memory» due to the process of reconstructing historical events and resorting to images-archetypes. The past turns into symbolic figures from memories which determine the identity and self-understanding of the ethnos. The mass media select facts from the heroic, sacrificial past in accordance with the spiritual needs of the ethnos in the present, thus contributing to its consolidation through the prism of time. The article analyzes the methods of information warfare in the issues of the Armenian Genocide. The paper substantiates the idea that the application of these methods in the mass media creates a communicative reality that comes into conflict with the historical reality and national memory. The author traces the tendency of using questions of the national, ethnic identity in the construction of the communicative reality. The author makes a conclusion about the destructive role of the ethnogenesis communicative potential, which is able to destroy the national community from the inside when it is used as an instrument of power and repression. In this regard, the mass media generate «communicative loneliness» of the individual, opposing him to the ethnos.