In the beginning of the 20th century the American journalist Walter Lippmann, who worked as war correspondent in WWI, ascertained how much the citizens’ perception of reality is being distorted by newspaper coverage. In 1922 he wrote a book about his experiences: "Public Opinion". Ever since, the book is used as the founding paper of modern communication science and stays surprisingly relevant, even after nearly 100 years. Since in modern society politics are experienced less through direct contact and participation but more through passive media consumption, young people, who are not active in a political party, are the demographic group, which is being influenced most by the media. For that reason the main goal of our project is to give the participants theoretical and practical qualifications, which will help them to deal with the information published in mass media in a better way. The project consists of two phases: 1. Preparation: planned for August - October 2015: - distributing tasks, preparing workshop contents and lecture contents - organising the schedule and specifying contents for discussion forums - communication in this phase mostly happens via e-mail and skype As part of the preparation a meeting with everyone responsible and all partners will be held. 2. Executive phase: 28.10.15 – 04.11.15: The main event of the project is a meeting in Munich for young people with Russian as their native language, all between the age of 16 and 30 years and from different EU countries. Many of them were already confronted with different examples of the public opinion being influenced by the mass media and also with resulting problems, like spreading and establishing stereotypes about certain nationalities and ethnic groups. The participants of the project acquire/develop new qualifications, which will help them in objectively classifying and structuring the information about political, public and social events, which they receive from the media. At this point they also find out more about the reasons for manipulated and contradictory coverage. Some of the skills and contents they will learn are the following: - intercultural skills through working in an international context - social skills (communication and working in a team) - civic dedication through the active work with socially relevant topics - theoretical basics of modern politics presentation - theoretical basics of content analysis and practical training, applying this knowledge to understand the impacted content and meaning in texts Due to their active participation in the informal learning process of the project, the young people will learn how to protect themselves from purposeful manipulation and will be motivated to counteract and to stop the spreading and distribution of influencing articles and posts in social media. As a consequence our project supports tolerance and mutual understanding between young people, helps and enables them to use their new attained skills and knowledge practically in future.