It appears that Fox News will not give in to the David Hogg, Media Matters and #TheResistance driven faux outrage over Laura Ingraham’s mild rebuke of Hogg as someone who “whines.” That faux outrage has been used to intimidate advertisers into fleeing Ingraham’s highly-rated program.
Fox News co-President Jack Abernathy just released this statement (via L.A. Times):
“We cannot and will not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts,” Jack Abernethy, co-president of Fox News, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. “We look forward to having Laura Ingraham back hosting her program next Monday when she returns from spring vacation with her children.”
For a decade activists like Angelo Carusone of Media Matters have been trying to pick off Fox News and other conservative media personalities by bombarding advertisers on social media. If Ingraham could be taken down over a mild comment about a flame-throwing activist like Hogg, then it would be like blood in the water to the unhinged social media anti-Trump activists.
I wrote last night, If Fox News cancels Laura Ingraham, it might as well close the network:
It’s not about Laura Ingraham or David Hogg — it’s about an unhinged and emboldened totalitarian movement that seeks to deplatform conservatives. Their primary target for a decade has been Fox News, which is the one non-liberal network in a sea of liberal major media.Sacrificing Laura Ingraham won’t satiate the beast. If Fox News cancels Laura Ingraham over this faux outrage about her tweet, then Fox News might as well close the network.
If past experience with Rush Limbaugh and others holds true this time, expect a continuing, guerilla-warfare style harassment of advertisers.
Limbaugh addressed what was happening to Ingraham on air today, and gave a nice shout out to me about my post:
RUSH: You know, folks, it’s like the libs’ real purpose behind something is often obscured and camouflaged. If you look, for example, this latest attempt here to boycott advertisers at Fox News. They’ve tried that with Sean Hannity. They tried it with Ted Baxter, and they got rid of Baxter. They were able to get rid of Bill O’Reilly. And this latest one is about Laura Ingraham and her supposed unserious taunting apology to David Camera Hogg, Parkland, Florida, high school fame. And so the response is, “Hey, she apologized.”“Well, it wasn’t good enough. Well, she didn’t mean it,” blah, blah. At some point it obfuscates what really is happening here. These things happen like clockwork. There is an entire left-wing apparatus set up to run these operations. And the ultimate objective for all of these — and Bill Jacobson, William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection, writes about this today, and he has a great term for what this actually is, and it is the attempt to deplatform American conservatives, take away conservative platforms, take away Fox News, not just a couple of hosts, but just get rid of the whole entity.
I hope Fox News stays strong on this. It will need to.
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