"I will kill you if you do not do X" is still a threat to kill you. All the more so when X is a thing the person will obviously not do. Rewriting the story would destroy whatever credibility they have as a journalist, and probably is literally not even possible assuming they work for any kind of reasonable organization (hey boss, I need you to update that story I wrote so a different set of gamblers win). Also, even if they did update it, they'd probably start receiving death threats from the gamblers on the other side of the bet they just screwed over.

Honestly kind of crazy that you call such an ultimatum a "rewrite option", as if that diminishes the fact that it's a death threat in any way whatsoever.