The issue of multiculturalism gains popularity among scholars, however very little research investigates how the media portrays this phenomenon. Research on depiction of interethnic relations in the media is especially topical in Russia, where more than 160 ethnic groups reside. This study investigates how Russian online media portrays the 46 largest ethnic minorities living in Russia from the perspective of the three hypotheses of intercultural interaction. We designed a system of indicators of multiculturalism for the analysis of the media contents. Using content analysis, we found that online media do not cover different aspects of multiculturalism with the same frequency. In particular, most often the minorities were displayed from the point of view of the integration hypothesis, least of all from the position of the contact hypothesis. However, this observation is not valid for individual groups. The most balanced coverage was observed for the Altais and Georgians. However, when depicting the remaining 44 groups the media focused only on one of the three domains of multiculturalism. For example, the coverage of the Laks and Tajiks was focused on the integration hypothesis; the coverage of the Tuvans, Komi and Chuvash people was focused on the identity hypothesis; the coverage of the Chechens and Avars was focused on the contact hypothesis. We found that although the media tend to depict ethnic diversity positively, this tendency did not hold for certain groups: on some cases the depiction was dominated by positive contents (e.g. the Tuvans, Laks, Mordvinians), in other cases – by negative contents (the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Azerbaijanis). The potential consequences of uneven representation of ethnocultural diversity by the media for the perception of these groups in reality are discussed in this paper.