Reuters, one of the largest international news agencies in the world, has come under fire for publishing a story about the upcoming US presidential election that omitted Marianne Williamson, the Democratic challenger who was one of the first declared candidates.
The article, titled “Factbox: 2024 US presidential election: who is in, who is out and who is still thinking about it,” was written by Ross Colvin, whose exclusion of Williamson from the list of candidates is tantamount to a lie.
In an amended version of the article, Reuters still got the facts wrong and characterized its victim as a “long shot” in an apparent effort to discredit the contender who might be the first woman elected to the White House.
Williamson, a best-selling author, launched her campaign for the Democratic nomination on March 4, but was falsely reported by Reuters to have launched it on March 23.
In a correction to the article, Reuters continued to misrepresent the facts by stating that she wants to challenge Democratic U.S. Joe Biden in the Democratic nominating race, when in reality, Williamson’s motivations for running barely take the incumbent into account.
In advance of her announcement, Williamson plainly said, “My motivations are a moral commitment to the tenets of liberty espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address; a realization of the Democratic Party’s shift away from the party of President Franklin Roosevelt; and the systemic economic injustices endured by millions of Americans by the undue influence of corporate money on our political system.”
While Williamson has a way to go before she is well known among voters who will decide which candidate gets the Democratic nomination for president in 2024, about three out of four Democrats say they do not want Biden to be the nominee.
In response to the omission, the Williamson campaign issued a statement criticizing Reuters for failing to uphold journalistic standards and for attempting to mislead the public. The campaign requested an immediate correction to the article, as well as a formal apology from Reuters.
The omission of Williamson’s name from the article has sparked outrage among her supporters, who argue that the mainstream media is attempting to “invisibilize” her campaign. Despite this, Williamson has vowed to continue spreading her message of fundamental economic and social repair and has received double-digit support in recent polls.
Peter Daou, Williamson’s campaign manager, has described her as “the ONLY viable outsider in the 2024 presidential race, who owes nothing to the establishment,” and has accused the mainstream media of attempting to silence her because she poses a real threat to the corrupt system.
“The intentional omission of Marianne Williamson’s name from the Reuters Factbox article titled “2024 US presidential election: who is in, who is out and who is still thinking about it” is below the journalistic standards of a mainstream news organization,” said a statement from the campaign. “In a democratic society, it is not only the right but also the responsibility of the press to report the news—not create it.”
The Williamson campaign requested a correction and a “formal apology from Reuters to the public for such a blatant transgression against its own journalistic standards and its obvious effort to mislead.”
While Reuters has since issued a correction to the article, neither Williamson nor the public has received an apology from the news agency.
It is a sign of corporate control over information sources that the mainstream media will not provide fair and accurate reporting of Williamson’s candidacy, just as journalists denied coverage to the 2016 campaign of US Senator Bernie Sanders.
Sanders received substantially less media coverage than Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 election, there was substantially more coverage of the GOP primary, and Republican candidate Donald Trump dominated media coverage despite his incessant lack of substance.
After the election, Sanders released a campaign book that devoted a chapter to how the national media refused to cover his visits to poverty-stricken areas of the country, and suggested that his blackout was a consequence of corporations like General Electric, Comcast, and Disney owning media conglomerates in order to deny coverage to issues like taxation and trans-national trade agreements.
Williamson joined by environmental hero Steven Donziger in New York City on Earth Day to address the climate crisis, but no major media outlet reported on the story. Donziger is the human rights lawyer who successfully sued Chevron on behalf of Ecuadorian Amazonian Indigenous peoples for massively polluting their ancestral land with oil.
Days earlier, environmental groups blasted Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul over her nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the New York state Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.
Halligan represented Chevron as it pursued racketeering charges against Donziger, in retaliation for holding the giant polluter accountable, which resulted in the first private corporation prosecuting an American citizen on criminal charges.