Beto O’Rourke campaign blasts Breitbart after ejecting reporter

Beto O’Rourke staffers kicked out a Breitbart News reporter from a campaign event in South Carolina this week — and on Wednesday defended their decision, saying the right-wing website walks a fine line between news and hate speech.

Joel Pollak wrote Tuesday that a campus police officer ejected him from the speech at Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina, after an O’Rourke campaign staffer saw his press credentials.

The editor-at-large said a staffer “threatened this reporter, saying that I could either leave voluntarily or be ‘officially uninvited’ from campus, suggesting arrest.”

A number of journalists from mainstream outlets on Wednesday shared Pollak’s story and denounced how the democratic presidential candidate’s campaign handled the situation.

“No matter what you think of Breitbart, this is wrong. No campaign should be deciding who gets to cover its events. An event is either open to the press, or it is not,” tweeted New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg.

A spokeswoman for the O’Rourke campaign, Aleigha Cavalier, said the staffers were just trying to make sure students attending the event “felt comfortable and safe.”

“Given this particular Breitbart employee’s previous hateful reporting and the sensitivity of the topics being discussed with students at an HBCU, a campaign staffer made the call to ask him to leave to ensure that the students attending the event felt comfortable and safe while sharing their experiences as young people of color,” the statement said.

Cavalier also blasted Breitbart as walking the line between being a news outlet and peddler of hate speech.

“Beto for America believes in the right to a free press and works hard to ensure the campaign reflects that,” the statement said.

“However, whether it’s dedicating an entire section of their website to ‘black crime,’ inferring that immigrants are terrorists, or using derogatory terms to refer to LGBTQ people, Breitbart News walks the line between being news and a perpetrator of hate speech.”

When pressed, the spokeswoman told CNN no reporters from Breitbart or any other outlets will have their access restricted from future events.

Breitbart fired back at the campaign saying: “The false accusation that Breitbart is racist, or that its award winning reporter — an Orthodox Jew, married to a black woman who serves in the military — is either racist or would make anyone at a black university uncomfortable is absurd. The irony of Mr. O’Rourke — who has stated himself that he is the beneficiary of ‘white privilege’ — purporting to decide for black students who should be banned from events that are open to the press, or what they should feel, is not lost on us.”

With Post wires

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