Beto O’Rourke’s campaign acknowledged Wednesday that it booted a Breitbart News reporter from a campaign event in South Carolina on Tuesday, while blasting the right-wing publication as walking a line “between being news and a perpetrator of hate speech.”

“Beto for America believes in the right to a free press and works hard to ensure the campaign reflects that,” Aleigha Cavalier, O’Rourke’s national press secretary, said in a written statement to POLITICO. “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.”


She wrote, “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.”

Cavalier’s comments came after Breitbart’s Joel Pollak reported Tuesday that he had been ejected from an O’Rourke event at a historically black college in South Carolina. Pollak wrote that a staffer “threatened this reporter, saying that I could either leave voluntarily or be ‘officially uninvited’ from campus, suggesting arrest.”

O'Rourke, a Democratic candidate for president, has spoken frequently while campaigning about the value of the free press, and O’Rourke's campaign said Wednesday that Breitbart reporters would be welcome at future events.

Nevertheless, the incident on Tuesday did not go unnoticed by mainstream reporters and media watchers. The Poynter Institute’s daily newsletter included a link to Pollak’s story, saying, “If the account is true, this is flat-out wrong and a really bad look for the Democratic hopeful’s campaign.”


Breitbart on Wednesday objected to the O'Rourke campaign's characterization of its site. A spokesperson said in an email, "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."