Fox News host Laura Ingraham panics as she loses advertisers after attacking Stoneman Douglas student
Yesterday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham made fun of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor David Hogg because he wasn’t accepted into his first college choice. Hogg responded by asking the public to put pressure on her show’s sponsors, and sure enough, less than a day later, several of those companies announced they were pulling their ads from Ingraham’s show. Now Ingraham is panicking in response.
Hogg tweeted a list of twelve brand names that are running ads during Laura Ingraham’s show, and urged his followers to ask those companies to pull their ads. Three of them, TripAdvisor, Wayfair, and Nutrish, responded by announcing that they were indeed pulling the plug (update: eight advertisers have now pulled the plug as of late Thursday). At that point Ingraham realized she was in trouble, as this was precisely the kind of pattern that led to Bill O’Reilly losing his Fox News show, and she began frantically trying to walk it back.
Ingraham tweeted “Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland.” Suffice it to say that her belated apology, which only came after she realized she was in trouble, and her bizarre reference to Holy Week, didn’t go over particularly well.
Hogg fired back with “An apology in an effort just to save your advertisers is not enough. I will only accept your apology only if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight. It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children.” He then continued encouraging Laura Ingraham’s sponsors to pull their ads from her show. Although replacement sponsors can be found, they generally won’t be willing to pay as much for the ad time. If Ingraham’s show becomes sufficiently unprofitable, Fox News will cancel her for business reasons. We know this because we saw them do it to O’Reilly, despite his popularity on the right.
