Fox News host Laura Ingraham is leaving her show in the hands of guest hosts next week. Her break comes in the midst of a devastating backlash against a tweet in which she mocked teenage mass-shooting survivor and gun-safety activist David Hogg.
Ingraham said the break was pre-planned. As Variety notes, however, another Fox News host who recently went on a planned vacation in the midst of a major controversy, Bill O’Reilly, never returned to the network.
Ingraham’s show has lost nearly a dozen major advertisers in recent days, including Johnson & Johnson, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Stitch Fix, Hulu, Nestle, Wayfair, TripAdvisor, and Rachael Ray’s Nutrish pet-food brand. The advertiser exodus came after a tweet in which Ingraham appeared to mock Hogg for being rejected by several colleges he applied to. Hogg responded by encouraging his own followers to contact Ingraham’s advertisers.
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In a statement, Wayfair said that “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.” According to Variety, IBM was the only “blue chip” advertiser to appear during Ingraham’s Friday show.
Hogg, a high school senior, has been among the most prominent survivors-turned-activists pushing for stricter gun control following the deaths of 17 of his classmates in a mass shooting. That has made him an uncomfortable but seemingly irresistible target of rage from conservatives and gun-rights absolutists, including some who have gone so far as to paint him as a fraudulent “crisis actor.”