April 3, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Despite media narratives framing the story as one of grassroots revolt, professional left-wing activists are actively involved in the campaign to pressure advertisers to boycott Fox News personality Laura Ingraham.
Last week, Ingraham tweeted that David Hogg, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student who became a national gun-control advocate after the February 14 shooting at his school, was “whin(ing)” in public complaints that four colleges had rejected him. She apologized the next day, but Hogg and other liberal figures continued their calls for advertisers to boycott her show.
“I will only accept your apology only if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight,” Hogg responded. “It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children.”
So far, 15 companies have pulled their ads from “The Ingraham Angle,” including Bayer, Office Depot, Hulu, TripAdvisor, Wayfair, Nestlé, and Johnson & Johnson. Ingraham is currently on what Fox says was a pre-planned break, but Fox co-president Jack Abernethy vows she will return next week and that the channel stands with her.
“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts,” Abernethy told the Los Angeles Times on Monday.
Breitbart reported that Media Matters, whose founder, David Brock, has described the organization’s mission as “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against Fox News, is promoting a list of companies that have recently advertised on Ingraham’s show. Hogg is currently using that list to encourage followers to “tweet away.” ThinkProgress has also highlighted the campaign in a series of articles and tweets.
Both groups owe their existence in large part to George Soros, the pro-abortion billionaire known for financing numerous left-wing causes. In Media Matters’ case, that support includes a $1 million donation in 2010 for the express purpose of “hold(ing) Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast,” to “more widely publicize” his objections to the channel.
Despite this latest controversy ostensibly being about Ingraham’s slight of Hogg amid the backdrop of the gun debate, it has begun transitioning to a broader attack on Ingraham, including her pro-family advocacy. On Friday, the pro-homosexual lobbying group GLAAD called on the media to cover Ingraham’s alleged “extensive record of attacking the LGBTQ community.”
The release compiles a variety of statements in which Ingraham criticizes the redefinition of marriage, transgender bathrooms, gender-“transition” treatment for minors, and more. It also repeats allegations that Ingraham outed closeted members of the Gay Students Association while she was editor of the Dartmouth Review, something Hogg has referenced as well.
In a 1997 Washington Post op-ed detailing her relationship with her gay brother Curtis, Ingraham maintained that she only published the names of “student officers who had already publicly identified themselves as gay.” She added that her purpose in sending a reporter to secretly record the publicly-advertised meeting was to investigate why it was the only student group receiving college funds to not publicly disclose how it spent those funds.
Ingraham is also a pro-life Catholic who has criticized people who protested the 2016 shooting of Harambe the gorilla yet “emit a collective yawn when we find out what really goes on in the abortuaries across this country,” presided over award ceremonies for pro-life activists, and received criticism for wearing a cross on the air.
Some conservative commentators, such as National Review’s David French and Townhall’s Guy Benson, criticized Ingraham’s original tweet, but overall the right has rallied around her. Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro said that while he disliked the tweet, Hogg’s activism makes him a valid subject for criticism. “When you join the public discourse, you take on slings and arrows,” he said. “That's even more true if you decide to maliciously malign your opponents, as Hogg has.”
“By now it should be crystal clear to every conservative — no matter whether they are Pro-Trump, Never Trump, pro-this or anti-that — what is happening in America,” the American Spectator’s Jeffry Lord wrote Tuesday. “Any conservative on television or radio or in fact with any audience of any kind, as in a speech invite to a college campus — is now a target for silencing.” Breitbart’s John Nolte agreed that the media wants to “destroy” Ingraham “only because she’s a conservative woman.”
Conservatives on social media have also rallied around the Twitter hashtag #IStandWithLaura to counter-boycott the companies that have left Ingraham’s show.