The research in this dissertation centers around polite and impolite strategies that appear in public discourse. The data set for the research was collected in the period from June 2015 to January 2016 in Croatian public media: television, radio and printed weekly magazines. It consists of five Otvoreno television shows, five radio shows of Poligraf - - politički grafikon and five issues per magazine (Nacional, Globus and Story). In the initial part of the paper, the interpretation of public discourse and the media (television, radio and newspapers) is stated, followed by an overview of previous research in which the most significant theories of politeness and impoliteness are described, theories that preceded them, which had a significant impact on their creation as well as research itself on the topic of (im)politeness that followed the theoretical models. The research is based on the hypothesis that speakers are either polite or impolite in order to achieve certain communicative effects. The collected results are described and analyzed using qualitative analysis of examples of polite and impolite strategies, as determined by Brown, and Levinson (1987) and Bousfield (2008). It considered goals, context, social factors (the relative power of the speaker over the interlocutor, social distance between speakers and the interlocutor), prosody, age, gender, body language, etc. Quantitative analysis determines the frequency of occurrence of various elements (such as, for example, the number of interlocutors (how many of them are men and how many are women), the number of polite and impolite conversations, the total number of strategies, total number of polite and impolite strategies, frequency of use of some words, etc.). Qualitative and quantitative analyses show to what extent the established research hypothesis is correct. The analysis of the research results shows that speakers use (im)polite strategies in interaction in order to meet their goals, but also cause certain effects, during which they may or may not care about the interlocutor's face. A special emphasis is placed on impolite language behavior because it has been scarcely researched in Croatian scientific literature so far. In addition, the importance of emotions will be pointed out because it is evident that they are present in every conversation and are of significant importance in the assessment of linguistic behavior. Furthermore, emotions are related to culture, but also to gender, and all these factors will be interdependent with each other in order for the analysis of the results to be comprehensive. In the paper, special attention is paid to the establishment of power and the aspect of entertainment, and an attempt is made to point out the importance of prosody and body language and gestures in distinguishing polite from impolite conversations. The importance of the roles and functions of interlocutors is pointed out in the choice of strategies and social closeness among interlocutors. Also, the triggers of impolite behavior are singled out, as well as the responses to impoliteness, with special regard to the differences in the linguistic behavior of men and women. Finally, responsibility for verbal behavior is discussed, as well as some novelties resulting from the research which require an interdisciplinary approach to (im)politeness in future research.