This article is devoted to the functioning of the German despecialized idioms (DI) in the media discourse. The material was the media contexts of the use of DI, taking origin from the various special areas: pre-professional (crafts, works), traditionally professional (maritime, medicine), new professional (professions related to technology, sports) and non-professional (games). It was supposed to study the actualization of modern meanings of idioms in the media discourse and their internal form (component composition and initial specialized semantics). The study is based on the analysis of the corpus of three German public political periodicals on the DWDS resource: “Berliner Zeitung”, “Tagesspiegel”, “Die Zeit”. The idioms discourse analysis was conducted at the intra-text and trans-text levels and involved a combination of the method of dictionary definitions, contextual semantic analysis, corpus analysis, and situational context analysis. The article discusses the features of formal, semantic and pragmatic actualization of DI in media texts, describes the most typical topics and areas of use in media texts (politics, economics, news discourse, culture, sports). Generally, DI are used normatively, but there are also cases of formal and semantic modifications. Remotivation of the internal form of DI and “revival” of special (professional) meaning, as a rule, occurs in the conditions of double actualization. Discourse analysis revealed new trends in synonymy, variability and distribution of DI, which are often markers of interdiscursivity.