Gingrich on the trail. (AP/Charlie Neibergall)
Newt Gingrich walked out of an interview with a Univ. of North Carolina newspaper on Saturday after a student reporter tried to ask him about Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the paper said.
Memet Walker, a reporter for the Daily Tar Heel, claimed that Gingrich agreed to an interview with him following a campaign stop in Greensboro.
A spokesman for the Gingrich campaign, however, told Yahoo News that no such interview was planned.
"Shouting questions as someone leaves a press avail is not abruptly leaving a [planned] interview," R.C. Hammond, the Gingrich spokesman, wrote on Twitter. "Facts not fiction, kid."
Walker said he tried to ask Gingrich—who last week criticized Fox for favoring Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican presidential nomination—about what Ailes said in response during a speech at UNC: that Gingrich was "trying to get a job at CNN, because he knows he isn't going to get to come back to Fox."
"Before I even had a chance on Saturday to relay Ailes' comments, [Gingrich's] aide pressed his hands against me, and several Secret Service agents stopped me in my tracks," Walker wrote in a post on the Daily Tar Heel's website:
"You're not asking that. You're done," his aide said.
Not "Next question." Just, "You're done."
"I was surprised that they weren't ready for the question," Walker continued. "I was surprised that they were so surprised I might ask it. To be honest, I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the speaker in a tough back-and-forth ... At my other job at a grocery store, my hardest-hitting question is usually, 'Paper or plastic?'"
Last week, Gingrich said that CNN—not Fox—had been the more "fair-and-balanced" network this cycle.
"I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through," Gingrich said during a meeting with tea party leaders in Delaware on Wednesday, according RealClearPolitics.com. "In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we're more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That's just a fact."
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