Even though Laura Ingraham has returned from vacation and hosted Monday night’s edition of The Ingraham Angle on the Fox News Channel, the criticism of her claim that Parkland gun activist David Hogg “whined” about not being accepted by a prestigious university continued, with the latest salvo coming from Daniel D’Addario, a TV critic for Time magazine.
In an article posted on the magazine’s website, D’Addario asserted that Ingraham is a “problem” for Fox News, which is undergoing “an interestingly existential moment” because “its past identity” as the “loyal opposition” to former President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats “is falling away in favor of a beast” with “different goals.”
“The network’s opinion slate was opposed to Obama in a knee-jerk manner,” he noted. “It was an object of interest for liberals, but not one of active protest.”
Now, however, “Fox News is in an interestingly existential moment,” the Time critic stated. “Its past identity is falling away in favor of a beast with many of the same rhetorical techniques, but different goals.”
Nevertheless, “Fox was the most-watched cable news network in the first quarter of 2018, proving it’s changing along with the appetites of its core viewership,” D’Addario admitted.
The Time analyst then claimed that the “uneasy existence” of Fox News “is exemplified by Laura Ingraham,” who “left the air” more than a week earlier “amid widespread criticism” regarding a tweet in which she claimed Parkland gun activist David Hogg “whined” about his application for admission being rejected.
That controversy led to advertisers --“including Bayer, Hulu and Johnson & Johnson” -- pulling their commercials from her program, he indicated.
“In Ingraham’s telling, she was being criticized for being conservative, or being bold,” he continued. “She referred to ‘bullies on the left aiming to silence conservatives’ and to an ongoing ‘contraction of free speech all around us.’”
“It’s a neat way for Ingraham to lump her own story along with the resentments of her imagined viewer, and it flatters both parties as brave,” he noted. “But continuing to express mainstream thought from a decade ago is precisely the opposite of what Fox News is up to.”
The Time critic also stated:
It’s not Ingraham’s expression of views that got her boycotted, it’s her decision to express those views by mocking and deriding a high-schooler who recently survived a school shooting.
But rather than defusing the situation, Ingraham doubled down, announcing on her Monday show that she will be running a continuing series of segments on threats to the First Amendment, like the one she faced down when her speech was met with more speech.
“The climate of resentment around Fox News has grown so great in recent months that Hannity viewers broadcast their destruction of their Keurig machines across social media,” the critic added.
“In that case, Keurig backed down, with the CEO of the company apologizing for giving the appearance of ‘taking sides,’” he noted. “Similarly, the late-night star Jimmy Kimmel backed down in his recent feud with Hannity, apologizing for vulgar tweets he’d directed at the Fox News host.”
“The increasing momentum of the Ingraham boycott -- whatever happens going forward -- seems to prove how powerfully entrenched the network’s new style of provocation has become,” the Time critic stated.
“Ingraham is able to stay on the air despite many of her advertisers having fallen away,” he grumbled. “And rather than reflecting on her statements about Hogg, she’s delivering a sermon that goes well beyond Fox News’s old right-wing pieties.”
D’Addario then asserted: “The Parkland cause has transfixed the nation and garnered widespread, mainstream support; it cannot have been a hard decision for the Bayers of the world to see a woman mocking a Parkland teen as something other than a good business partner.”
It’s always interesting when liberals give advice to conservatives and Republicans. Of course, that generous “advice” would result in changing their points of view so that they wind up agreeing with the people on the other side of the political aisle.
