Trevor Noah on Monday decided to take a closer look at GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson's assertion that the media is vetting his background more intensely than it did for President Barack Obama during his presidential campaign.
Republican candidates have spent a great deal of time so far in this election cycle criticizing the media for liberal bias -- from critiquing the way debates have been moderated to complaining about being treated "unfairly" by the media -- and Carson has been no exception to this trend. In an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press," Carson claimed that the media is investigating his past with more fervor than any other presidential candidate in prior elections.
“I have not seen that with anyone else,” Carson told NBC’s Chris Jansing. "If you can show me where that’s happened with someone else, I’ll will take that statement back.”
"Challenge accepted, Dr. Carson," Noah said on "The Daily Show," before showing a montage of news clips from the 2008 election cycle in which the media exhaustedly vetted then-Senator Obama's background -- going so far as to question whether he was really a U.S. citizen.
“Yeah, so they vetted Obama to the point where they questioned that he was a legitimate natural-born American citizen,” Noah said. “But at least no one ever accused Obama of not stabbing a guy.”
In his 1990 autobiography Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story, Carson claimed to be violent during his youth. And in a series of interviews and public statements, he has talked about past aggression, including attempting to stab a friend and attacking his mother with a hammer. However, CNN spoke to nine of Carson's former classmates, friends and neighbors, who said they have no memory of the presidential candidate ever being violent.
Noah pointed out the irony that Carson is lashing out at the media after it found he actually was not as violent as he says he was.
“Maybe it’s me or where I’m from ... but this shit is weird,” Noah quipped. “So the media is saying, ‘Those rumors about you having a clean record and you being an upstanding member of society, those things are true.’ And Ben Carson’s like, ‘Bullshit! I’m dangerous and I tried to kill people and I’m a bad person and I should be president.’ What world are we living in?”
Watch the clip from "The Daily Show" above.