Fox News Devastates Hogg With Official Statement On Ingraham's Future
Fox News host Laura Ingraham has been the target of a coordinated boycott from the left over the past several days after she made a critical remark about one of the media-adored liberal students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
But according to Independent Journal Review, a statement from Fox itself just made it abundantly clear that the host isn’t going anywhere, despite a plethora of advertisers buckling under the pressure and fleeing her program, “The Ingraham Angle.”
The anti-Ingraham campaign began in earnest last week after she tweeted a link to an article which noted that Parkland student David Hogg — who has become a primary face of the left’s latest anti-Second Amendment push following the massacre at his school — had been rejected from a number of the universities he applied to.
Ingraham wrote in the tweet Hogg was whining about his rejections — a true statement of fact, as he himself had tweeted about it and mentioned it in interviews.
Nevertheless, that tweet caused Hogg to become offended. He took to Twitter himself and demanded a boycott and pressure campaign against her program’s sponsors, which fellow liberals were only too happy to help out with.
Ingraham quickly apologized for her remark as the liberal boycott began to gain traction, but Hogg flatly refused to accept her apology. He doubled down on his calls for the boycott, with plenty of assistance from his liberal followers and the anti-Fox leftists at Media Matters for America.
All told, Ingraham lost more than a dozen advertisers in the span of a few days. But according to the Los Angeles Times, Fox executives have issued an unmistakable statement in support of her continued employment as a prime-time host at the network, once she returns from an already-scheduled vacation this week.
“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts,” said Fox News co-president Jack Abernethy. “We look forward to having Laura Ingraham back hosting her program next Monday when she returns from spring vacation with her children.”
That statement, coming in response to a concerted effort to destroy Ingraham’s career, couldn’t be more clear.
In fact, despite the flood of sponsors pulling advertisements from Ingraham’s program, an unnamed source “familiar with the situation” informed the L.A. Times that the network hasn’t really taken any sort of financial hit from the boycott. Instead, most of those pulled advertisements were simply moved to other programs in the Fox lineup in order to avoid the controversy.
That person added that at least some of those sponsors are likely to return their ads to Ingraham’s program once she returns from vacation and the controversy surrounding her remark dies down.
Regardless of whether those sponsors and ads ever return or not, Abernethy just made it crystal clear to Hogg and his fellow Fox-haters that the network will stand behind Ingraham and not toss her to the side simply because an angry liberal teenager — who has no problem dishing out his own abuse against others — had his feelings hurt.
Regular viewers of Fox may recall that similar targeted boycotts of sponsors have been launched against network hosts in the past with some success, most notably in protest of Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.
However, Ingraham’s perhaps ill-advised tweet directed at a loudmouth teen — one who has repeatedly and ruthlessly attacked sitting senators, the National Rifle Association and law-abiding gun owners — doesn’t really compare to the sordid sexual harassment allegations against O’Reilly. It also doesn’t compare to what the Times called “wildly extreme” theories presented by Beck about former President Barack Obama, which landed the host in hot water with the network.
Hogg and his friends have seemingly gained an over-developed sense of self-importance and power fostered over the past month thanks to the constant attention and flattery showered on them by the liberal media and gun control activists.
Hogg likely thought he could use this new-found power to silence a voice that had simply criticized him over things he himself complained about.
But silencing dissenting or critical voices simply because one doesn’t like what they say isn’t how things are supposed to work in a healthy democracy or constitutional republic, and this sort of tactic embraced by angry liberals needs to be nipped in the bud.
By making it abundantly clear that they are standing in defense of Ingraham against this leftist campaign, Fox News is helping to ensure that one day, these sorts of fascist techniques are a thing of the past.
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