Student
David Hogg tweeted list urging 12 advertisers to pull out of presenter’s show
At least five companies said they were dropping advertisements from
Laura Ingraham’s
Fox News show after the conservative pundit mocked a teenage survivor of the Florida school massacre on Twitter and he responded with a call for a boycott.
Parkland student David Hogg, 17, tweeted a list of a dozen companies that advertise on The Ingraham Angle and urged his supporters to demand they cancel their ads.
Hogg is a survivor of the 14 February mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in the Parkland suburb of Fort Lauderdale. He and other classmates have become the faces of a new youth-led movement calling for tighter restrictions on firearms.
Hogg took aim at Ingraham’s advertisers after she taunted him on Twitter, accusing him of whining about being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied.
On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology “in the spirit of Holy Week”, saying she was sorry for any hurt or upset she caused Hogg or any of the “brave victims” of Parkland.
“For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David … immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how ‘poised’ he was given the tragedy,” Ingraham tweeted.
But her apology did not stop companies from departing.
Nutrish, the pet food line created by celebrity chef Rachael Ray, travel website TripAdvisor, online home furnishings seller Wayfair, the world’s largest packaged food company Nestle and travel website Expedia all said they were cancelling their advertisements.
Wayfair said in a statement it supports dialogue and debate but “the decision of an adult to personally criticise a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”
Responding to public pressure, Nestle wrote on Twitter that it had “no plans to buy ads on the show in future.”
CNBC cited a TripAdvisor spokesman as saying the company does not condone “inappropriate comments” by Ingraham that “cross the line of decency”.
Hogg wrote on Twitter that an apology just to mollify advertisers was insufficient. He said he would accept it only if Ingraham denounced the way Fox News treated him and his friends.
“It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children,” Hogg tweeted.