The manner in which the media presents its recipients with political content has a strong impact on knowledge, attitudes, opinions and electoral behavior. The content of the media cannot be a full reflection of political reality, but the way in which the reality presents it may be closer or more distant from the idea of objectivity and neutrality. The category describing the scale of deviation from the idea of a balanced presentation of content is the media political bias. The aim of this article is to present this concept and determine the specific features of media political bias, its main determinants, elements of the media which make us deal with biased content, and the relationship between the concept of media political bias and other selected theoretical concepts regarding media.

Within the article activity of media broadcasters during the migration crisis of 2015 has been analysed – the crisis whose peak coincided with the period of political campaign preceding the parliamentary elections in Poland. In this context, strong emphasis on issues related to the migration crisis, which had become one of the leading themes of the parliamentary campaign, could have been expected in Polish press market, especially taking into consideration strong political affiliations of weekly opinion magazines existing in the said market at the time. In the presented article, 207 issues of the following opinion weeklies have been analysed: “Newsweek”, “Polityka”, “wSieci” and “Do Rzeczy”, in order to determine the media importance of migration-related themes and of the level of political parallelism of the studied media (political/axiological or party profiling of media releases). The study used the content analysis method with reference to the concept of framing.