At least seven companies on Thursday 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 that they cancel their ads.
Hogg is a survivor of the Feb. 14 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 on Wednesday, accusing him of whining about being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied.
Ingraham on Thursday tweeted an apology “in the spirit of Holy Week,” saying that she was sorry for any hurt or upset that she had 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.
However, her apology did not stop companies from departing.
Nutrish, the pet food line created by celebrity chef Rachael Ray; travel Web site TripAdvisor Inc; online home furnishings seller Wayfair Inc; the world’s largest packaged food company, Nestle SA; online streaming service Hulu; travel Web site Expedia Group Inc; and online personal shopping service Stitch Fix all said they were canceling their advertisements.
Wayfair said in a statement that it supports dialogue and debate, but “the decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”
Replying to Hogg’s boycott call, Nutrish tweeted: “We are in the process of removing our ads from Laura Ingraham’s program.”
Responding to public pressure, Nestle wrote on Twitter that it had “no plans to buy ads on the show in future.”
Hogg wrote on Twitter that an apology just to mollify advertisers was insufficient.
He would accept it only if Ingraham denounced the way that Fox News had treated him and his friends, he said.
“It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children,” Hogg tweeted.
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