Ben Carson fired back at CNN on Friday for its “pathetic” investigation into his claims of being a violent child, and railed against what he deemed a corrupt media.
CNN interviewed nine of the GOP candidate’s former classmates and friends for an investigation which found no evidence to support his stories of violent acts toward family and friends as a juvenile.
“What makes you think you’re going to find those specific people?” Carson asked CNN’s Alisyn Camerota during an interview on “New Day.”
Carson claimed CNN spoke to people who knew him years after he committed violent acts. In response to why he declined to offer CNN evidence to back up claims of attacking family and friends as a juvenile, he said he didn’t want to victimize those people.
“This is a bunch of lies… I think it’s pathetic,” Carson said, claiming CNN is fishing for a scandal that doesn’t exist.
Carson then got into a tense exchange with Camerota over what he deemed widespread media bias, going as far as suggesting that without Fox News, the U.S. would be like Cuba.
“The general mainstream media all seems to move in a secular progressive direction,” he said.
“They would like to create a narrative that certain things are good and certain things are bad according to the way that they see them,” he continued, then praising one network for offering a counterbalance.
“We’d be Cuba if there were no Fox News,” he said. Camerota pushed back, asking Carson if he thought the U.S. was Communist before 2001, when Fox News took off ratings wise.
“If we didn’t have that counterbalance [Fox News] — I wish we didn’t need that counterbalance,” Carson continued, adding that the media is supposed to be neutral but has become “very partisan and very ideological.”