On Wednesday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham opined about Parkland shooting survivor and gun regulation advocate David Hogg and made fun of him for not getting into several universities. She tweeted, “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.)” In response, Hogg announced an effort to boycott Ingraham advertisers.
Hogg then tweeted out a list of the top twelve advertisers on (presumably) Ingraham’s Fox News show, the Ingraham Angle and encouraged people to pick a number and contact that company. The tweet, as of publication, had over 50,000 retweets. By Thursday, the efforts had yielded some successes as TripAdvisor, Nestle, Expedia, Hulu, Nutrish, Wayfair, and Jos A. Bank announced that they were cutting ties with Ingraham.
The effort was not the first advertiser boycott aimed at Fox News. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were both the targets of advertiser boycotts and O’Reilly left the network after the resulting advertiser exodus (in addition to allegations of misconduct).
Ingraham later apologized to Hogg, tweeting, “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. 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. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show anytime for a productive discussion. WATCH: https://youtu.be/K0v7yxczipo.”
Hogg did not seem to accept the apology, quote-tweeting another user and saying, “I 100% agree an apology in an effort just to save your advertisers is not enough. I will only accept your [Ingraham’s] 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.”
If Ingraham’s attempt was to stop advertisers from leaving, that was not successful. Hulu left after her apology and as of Thursday night Hogg was still organizing people in an effort to get Arby’s to drop their Ingraham advertising.