Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said he ultimately suspended his campaign because it became too difficult to raise money, especially since the media had declared the race for the Republican nomination essentially over. But the former Pennsylvania senator said he didn't want to lay blame in his decision to exit.
"After Wisconsin it was very, very difficult to raise money, but one of the reasons for that was the media narrative that the race is over," said Santorum in an interview with Fox News.
Santorum said at a point, nearly every question he received was about the long odds he faced in the race.
"And it was just this — the entire week leading up to Wisconsin was, 'When are you getting out of the race? Why are you still in the race? It's over,' " Santorum said. "And that was what was continually reported on every network ... this narrative that it was impossible and that it was just a matter of time. And it's hard to cut through that. And we were finding it very, very difficult to do that."
But the former senator said the responsibility ultimately lay at the feet of his campaign.
"I don't blame the media," Santorum said. "The media was doing what they thought was a story ... I take responsibility for that. If we didn't do a good enough job in communicating our message, you can't rely on the media to do that for you. It would be nice if they would, but you can't."
"And so you've got to go out and just figure out ways to effectively communicate that message. And I think we did a good job on a lot of fronts, but I think on a lot of fronts, we could have done a better job," Santorum added.
Still, Santorum made the media a frequent target of criticism during his time on the campaign trail, suggesting that Fox News was "shilling" for rival Mitt Romney and that popular news aggregation website the Drudge Report similarly favored the now-presumptive nominee.
That sentiment was echoed by presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich earlier this week.
“I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said during a private meeting at Wesley College in Delaware that Real Clear Politics gained access to. “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.”
Fox News fired back later Thursday.
"This is nothing other than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN — that's the kind of man he is," a spokeswoman for Fox News told Yahoo News. "Not to mention, he's still bitter about the fact that we terminated his contributor contract."
