The news media's role in holding politicians accountable is instrumental to representative democracy. Yet, politicians often claim that media are biased against them. I develop a model in order to understand how politicians communicate regarding media bias, how media and voters respond to these messages, and evaluate the consequences of this communication channel for democratic accountability. While all politicians criticize adversarial media, low quality politicians are tempted to self-servingly criticize unbiased media to skirt accountability. In so doing, they turn unbiased media against them, thus disallowing informative cheap-talk reporting, but at the expense of their reputation. Moreover, politicians couple dishonest media criticism with harmful actions and pandering. Overall, politician messaging improves selection but has ambiguous effects on control and voter welfare.