The Role of the Media in Creating the Image of a Tourist Destination

The issue of image, personal, organizational, brand, destination, is one of the most important issues that attracts the attention of the social, business and scientific public. This paper draws attention to the need for a comprehensive treatment of the image, the mechanisms of its formation, and especially to the difficulties of considering the image phenomenon in isolation, separated from its basis - identity. Numerous studies of the image of tourist destinations in the past decades, mostly of an empirical nature, remain on the surface of this phenomenon. Their results do not contribute to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, primarily due to the absence of an appropriate conceptualization and theoretical framework. Regarding the image of the destination, the most important thing is, of course, its end result, but the analysis of the image phenomenon, the separation of one into its constituent factors, different, opposite and contradictory, reveals levers whose shaping and use can influence the end result - the image. The role of mass media in this process, especially in the digital era, is very significant, but not decisive.