The natural relationship between an elected official and a reporter is one of mutual animosity and mutual dependence. If the reporter does not cover the elected official, then the elected official does not get their message out; if the elected official does not talk to the reporter, then the reporter does not have a story to tell. Add to that the reality that the media need to run interesting stories, which generally are about scandal and intrigue rather than policy, and we end up with a system where reporters are incentivized to look for the worst, leading elected officials to cry bias. All of that is fine because the First Amendment set it up that way.

Unfortunately, recent developments have shown that this pillar is under attack. First, President Trump cut $1.15 billion in funding for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. One could argue that this is a good idea because a government-funded press is a violation of the First Amendment. But that isn’t what the president argued. His website says that his administration was “ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media.” To be clear, this has been a desire of Republican presidents and nominees for over 50 years. President Richard Nixon was very concerned about what he perceived as the liberal bias of NPR in the 1970s and candidate Mitt Romney caught flak for wanting to cut Big Bird in 2012. Claiming bias in the media is neither new nor unique to Republicans, every time there’s a story that shows the government in a bad light, the elected officials’ response is “media bias.” The troubling development is that a media outlet was cut for bias.

Second, President Trump has taken to suing private media outlets for their coverage. He was angry about how CBS’s “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, so he sued Paramount, which settled with him. He’s angry about how the Wall Street Journal covered the Jeffrey Epstein story, so he sued them. The president, an elected official of the government, is suing media outlets for the way they cover him. He has not embraced the foundational truth of a free media: it’s supposed to say not nice things about elected officials. The government can complain about the coverage, elected officials can cry bias, but the government should not be pressuring the media on how to cover the government.

Third, President Trump has wooed media kings to ensure his coverage is good. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, stood right behind President Trump at his inauguration. Bezos has required that the newspaper be “unapologetically patriotic” and has bought out the contracts of journalists who would cover the government with a critical eye. For the record, I consider it unapologetically patriotic to criticize the government; in fact, there’s probably nothing more American than that.

Potentially the most catastrophic consequence of defunding public broadcasting is the lack of coverage of rural areas, which is a form of media bias. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican, voted against the cuts because the only media station located in rural Alaska is a PBS station, which is the only way to get word out about an earthquake. Murkowski was worried about her constituents and what will happen when the next earthquake hits, but her pleas to save funding for those stations fell on deaf ears. There’s no bias in telling people that an earthquake is coming, but because President Trump wants to prevent any media from saying anything negative about him, there will be no coverage in Alaska for the next earthquake.

Private media folding to President Trump is private media folding to the government. He is an elected official, and when the media stop covering issues a certain way because of his threats or his wooing, that’s “media bias.” If the media stop existing because he defunds them for not being nice to him, that’s also “media bias.” If we are to end media bias, as the Trump administration claims it wants to do, then we need to fully fund public broadcasting and the President needs to stop suing and wooing media outlets.

Leah Murray is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.