Axios this week published what is likely the biggest media muck-up of the entire 2020 Democratic primary — and you probably did not even notice.@BecketAdams https://t.co/NTI6nTs7Rl
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 19, 2020
Sanders has not suspended his campaign. Axios simply got the story horribly, terribly wrong. And it did not get the story wrong just a little bit, like publishing a false breaking news alert or a misleading headline. Axios published an entire detailed report on the senator’s supposed decision to shutter his campaign.
“Bernie Sanders to suspend presidential campaign,” read the headline to the since-deleted news report.
Moments after the bogus story published, Bloomberg News’s Laura Litvan tweeted what she believed was an accurate breaking news alert announcing the death of the Sanders campaign. Her tweet was shared and copied by dozens of journalists, and the false report soon spread all over social media.