It is no secret that mass media has an extremely powerful impact on the implementation of family policy. And it is often noted that images of women play a considerable role in the implementation of family policy objectives through the media. However, most researchers consider the image of women and mothers in the context of its influence on the communicative messages recipient in the media and do not consider how the media themselves change their information product under the external influence of the state family policy. This article presents the results of the thematic content analysis of 723 media publications devoted to issues related to the family, published be-tween 2000 and 2015 in six Russian newspapers, divided into two groups: state-owned and private, representing different political orientation. The mathematical processing of the data gathered by the content analysis was performed using Fisher’s angular transformation (to evaluate differences in proportion of each of the topics in the general thematic structure of state and private media publications for the two periods of 2000—2006 and 2007—2015) and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient to explore the relations between topics in the media publications about the family. Both state and private Russian media after 2006 convey normative family model, designed to solve the demographic problem and increase fertility. Questions of biopolitics and adoption, having many children began to take a larger share in the publication thematic structure of media of both types. Woman as the main object of pro-natalist family policy is presented in the media in relation to three aspects: the inner world of family, in the interaction with the community and as part of the state and public perceptions of the family. According to the author this discussion of the economic aspects of the family’s existence has no signifi-cant weight and does not support political discourse about the financial problems as the main reason of women failure to have children.
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