The article deals with the study of ways and means of verbalizing the protest discourse that formed in the mass media of Latvia in the fall of 2017, after the initiative of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Latvia to amend the Law “On Education”. The aim of the study was to identify and linguistic analysis of the speech means of representing protest sentiments in the Russian-language media of Latvia, supporting the position of defenders of Russian schools. As a result of a content analysis of materials from the Russian-language newspapers 55 journalistic texts were selected reflecting the conflict situation, and 348 text units verbalizing protest sentiments. Using a discourse analysis of text units, it was found that the main strategy for the formation of a protest discourse in these media is a communicative strategy of aggressiveness, implemented through appropriate tactics: discredit of political opponents, accuse, humiliation, negative outlook and others. The main means of representing the protest sentiments in the media is speech aggression. The article defines the types of verbal aggression for a communicative purpose, the type of violation of the norm and the language form of expression; lexical, grammatical and discursive means of verbalization are identified. As a result, the hypothesis about the predominance of implicit forms of verbal aggression over explicit ones was confirmed, which is explained by the desire of journalists to comply with the country's laws and ethical codes and express a negative attitude to the displayed phenomena.