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30th Mar 2018

Fox News host apologises and loses several advertisers after mocking survivor of Florida school shooting

Conor Heneghan

Several major companies have pulled advertisements from Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show as a result.

Laura Ingraham, host of The Ingraham Angle on Fox News, has apologised after mocking a survivor of the Parkland school shooting on Twitter earlier this week.

On Wednesday, Ingraham posted a link to an article about teenager David Hogg (pictured above), who survived the mass shooting in Parkland in Florida on Valentine’s Day in which 17 people lost their lives.

Commenting on the link posted on her Twitter feed, Ingraham accused Hogg of whining about being rejected by the colleges and said that the rejection was predictable given his GPA (Grade Point Average) and acceptance rates.

Hogg, who has become a prominent gun control activist since the shooting, is one of the founding members of the activist group Never Again MSD and has over 650,000 followers on Twitter, responded by calling on his followers to contact some of the major advertisers on Ingraham’s show in an effort to initiate a boycott.

Ingraham issued an apology on Twitter to Hogg and to “any of the brave victims of Parkland” for “any upset or hurt” her tweet may have caused and invited Hogg to return to her show at any time for “a productive discussion”.

Her apology, however, didn’t stop a number of major companies from pulling advertisements from Ingraham’s show on Fox News, with Nestlé, Hulu, Johnson and Johnson, Expedia and TripAdvisor amongst those to confirm that they had, or were in the process of, removing advertisements from the programme.

In response to a post from the father of a girl who lost her life in the Parkland shooting, Hogg said he would accept the apology “only if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight”.

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