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.

This study addresses the positioning of Poland’s public television network (TVP) within the country’s contemporary political system. In a democratic country, the media laws determine journalism practices and the media content. In this study, three perspectives of analysis were used to assess the relationship between the process of politicization and the selection and shaping of news. Three areas of the TVP’s politicization were focused on: media law, journalists, and media content, to show the dependence between these fields and how the news was shaped and presented. Mixed methods of empirical research were used to investigate the raised issues; the authors focused on Polish parliament papers (N = 45) regarding the legal regulations of Polish public broadcasters during the period of 2015–2016; conducted in-depth interviews with journalists with TVP experience (N = 20); and performed a content analysis of the Polish public television channel TVP1’s “Newsnight” news program during the period of February 4–10, 2019. We found that an increased level of politicization at Poland’s TVP led to direct influence on the shape and selection of news.