Newt Gingrich lashed out at his former employer, Fox News, in a private meeting with a handful of Delaware tea baggers this week:

“I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said during the private meeting — to which RealClearPolitics was granted access — at Wesley College. “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.

…“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point [who] said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich said. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches FOX.”

Translation: “It was okay with me that Fox was a Republican Party propaganda channel — until they turned their propagandizing against me.”

A little later, Newt’s Cry Baby personality — the one that shut down the U.S. government in 1996 because mean ol’ Bill Clinton made him ride in the back of Air Force One — had something to say:

“They know I don’t care about their opinions,” he said. “I don’t go to their cocktail parties. I don’t go to their Christmas parties. The only press events I go to are interesting dinners when the wife insists on it, so we’re going to go to the White House Correspondents’ dinner because she wants to. And we’re actually going to go to CNN’s table, not FOX.”

The bit about his not coming to the Fox Christmas party must have struck a nerve at the propaganda network. Dave Weigel found this “classic, needlessly mean” reaction from a Fox spox:

This is nothing other than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN — that’s the kind of man he is. Not to mention, he’s still bitter about the fact that we terminated his contributor contract.

It’s true. Fox cancelled his $1 million per year contract when Newt announced he was running for president. It’s also true that he could use the money now. Newt’s campaign is about $5 million in debt and is welching on payments to its small-business suppliers, and his heath-care “thimk tank” recently declared bankruptcy.