Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, a potential Republican presidential candidate, says he wasn’t talking about his former colleagues at Fox News when he said women in New York were “trashy” for swearing in the workplace.

“People actually have to read my book. I never said anything derogatory about the people at Fox News,” Huckabee told radio host Tyler Cralle in an interview on Wednesday. “In fact, if they read the book they would see that the only time I mention Fox News is in an incredibly supportive and laudatory way. I talked about the overall coarseness of conversation and gratuitous profanity that I hear in places in what I call the bubble zoo like New York, Washington and Hollywood but clearly, the reporters who took those headlines and made those stories up made ‘em up out of thin air. It’s an outright lie.”

In an appearance last Friday on Mickelson in the Morning, Huckabee described the “culture shock” he saw going to work in New York in which people used profanity in a professional setting.

“In Iowa, you would not have people who would just throw the f-bomb and use gratuitous profanity in a professional setting,” he said. “In New York, not only do the men do it, but the women do it,” he added, “this is worse than a lot locker room talk. This would be considered totally inappropriate to say these things in front of a woman and for a woman to say them in a professional setting. As we would say in the south ‘that’s just trashy.'”

Huckabee called it “a clear indication that journalism is pretty much dead in America” that people believed he was talking about Fox News.

“I’m just amazed that I am having to face those headlines today because it’s the people who are saying it can’t find one page in my book where I said that. I can show them many pages where I said the exact opposite and it’s a clear indication that journalism is pretty much dead in America and they cannot come up…I just wonder do some of the people in these news organizations, do they know how to read or are they do they copy what somebody else has said?”

“And it’s really frustrating for me to see that because I love my former colleagues at Fox, it was a great place to work, and the only things that I’ve ever said about Fox was how terrific the experience was. And for them to come up with headlines that absolutely have no basis in fact, it is quite frustrating to me.”

Here’s chapter three of Huckabee’s book on the “culture of crude”:

Then I started working each week in New York. Guess what? People do talk like that! Even in business settings and in mixed company of men and women, I realized that some people’s vocabulary was clearly limited to a small inventory of nouns and verbs with large doses of the “f-bomb” interspersed throughout. It must have seemed like maturity to those who found a way to make every third word a profane utterance, but it’s always struck me that the ultimate definition of profanity is the forcible expression of a feeble mind.