Amid a social media storm complaining about what looks like Fox News bias toward Donald Trump, Sean Hannity tweeted on April 1 that he had been unable to book Ted Cruz on his program for the last 10 days, and was told the Cruz campaign “could not make it work. ”

According to the Blaze, a Cruz campaign spokesperson said that Cruz was on Hannity’s program last Monday for an interview that lasted about 12 minutes. Before that interview aired, Cruz’s rapid response director Brian Phillips suggested that it might be the candidate’s last appearance with Hannity because “Sean spends half of the interview pushing Trump smears.”

Cruz has complained in the last few months that the media is, in part, responsible for the rise of Trump. Cruz has cited a statistic from MediaQuant which found that Trump has received nearly $2 billion in free media this election cycle. The media seems a little sensitive about this. Cruz tried to make that argument during a CNN town hall earlier this week, and Anderson Cooper pushed back:

“How many hours of free media does CNN and Fox and every other station — you let him call in. And for a year he got $2 billion in free media,” Cruz said at the time.

“We’ve asked you for interviews pretty much every day and you’ve declined every offer on my program,” Cooper shot back.

There is a yuge difference in a 10 -12 minute interview and televising an entire Trump campaign events live. Worse was when Fox broke away from their main evening news show, Special Report with Brett Baier, and broadcast Trump’s entire AIPAC speech live. Cruz is right. The mainstream legacy media deserves a lot of credit for the rise of Trump. Two billion dollars is a very significant contribution.