Nowadays researching socio-political broadcasting of the 21st century is topical. The recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number of journalistic radio programs, evolution of their format and genre diversity, and improvement of broadcasting forms and approaches. However, modern radio publicism as independent form of public-oriented journalism has not been studied sufficiently. The article deals with theoretical ambiguity of the concept of publicism (political and topical journalism), determines its general characteristics and patterns, namely, depth of author's thought, a high level of personification, strong emotion, direct appeal to the society, publicist's own ideals and values, solemnity, prepossession, worldview forming, and rapid development during transition and crisis periods. The authors analyze correlation between the notions “publicism” and “publicist style”, and determine that the latter, being the journalist's manner of interpreting a public phenomenon and a way of his/her