Fox News Host Laura Ingraham is taking a week-long break after facing severe backlash for her social media attack on Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.
Last week on Twitter, Ingraham mocked Hogg in a tweet describing how Hogg, 17, was rejected by four colleges: “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.).”
The Florida high school student helped organize the March for Our Lives, a movement bringing students together from across the nation to take a united stand against gun violence. Last Tuesday, Hogg openly revealed how four universities in the state of California turned down his application: the University of California in Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Irvine.
“I am not surprised, in all honesty,” Hogg said. “I think there’s a lot of amazing people that don’t get into college, not only that do things like I do, but because their voices just aren’t heard in the tsunami of people that apply every year to colleges…”
Hogg certainly did not “whine” about his rejections to the media, but Ingraham took full advantage of the opportunity to act out like an insecure middle school girl. While news sources are supposed to be unbiased, it’s common knowledge they share different opinions on political and social issues, but that does not condone personally attacking a teenager.
In response to Ingraham’s Twitter remarks, Hogg created a viral social media boycott to urge advertisers to pull from Ingraham’s show, ‘The Ingraham Angle.’ Hogg listed out Ingraham’s top advertisers and encouraged his followers to contact each company.
Nearly a dozen advertisers pulled their ads from Ingraham’s program. Liberty Mutual and Office Depot most recently pulled their support, and they were joined by other companies such as Nestle, Expedia, Hulu, Johnson & Johnson, Nutrish Pet Foods, TripAdvisor, Wayfair, Jenny Craig and the Atlantis Paradise Island Resort.
Clearly, a 17-year-old student with a strong Twitter following has more power than Ingraham thought—or maybe she just didn’t think at all.
After drowning in waves of backlash, Ingraham announced on her show last week she would be taking a week off for Easter break with her family and returned to Twitter to apologize to Hogg “in the spirit of Holy Week.”
Hogg responded: “Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week.”
“I hope she uses this time to reflect not only on how she treated me, but so many others like the students at Dartmouth or even people like LeBron James,” Hogg said to the ‘New York Daily News.’
For those who don’t know about Ingraham’s actions toward students at Dartmouth or LeBron James, here’s a summary: In 1984, while Ingraham was a student at Dartmouth College, she secretly recorded a confidential support group for homosexual students and then proceeded to publish the transcript in The Dartmouth Review with the full names of the students who were in the meeting. Some of these students had not told anyone about their sexuality, and it should be noted this occurred in a time when being homosexual meant the possibility of being rejected for jobs and openly attacked.
As for her actions against LeBron James, during a 17-minute interview with ESPN broadcaster Cari Champion, James discussed his career, his family and the challenges he faces being a black public figure in the U.S. Ingraham called his comments “barely intelligible” and “ungrammatical.”
“It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball,” Ingraham said. “Keep the political comments to yourselves—shut up and dribble.”
Hogg, the students at Dartmouth and LeBron James are most certainly not the only lives Ingraham has hurt with her ignorant actions. All I have to say to Ingraham: I hope you had some healthy reflections.
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