Boycotting Laura Ingraham Is Patriotic
In the wake of her recent decision to hop on Twitter and drag gun safety activist David Hogg for not being admitted to his college of choice, Fox News personality and noted basketball enthusiast Laura Ingraham embarks this week on a spring break vacation with her family. This trip, we are assured, is one that has definitely been on the calendar for months, and that is definitely not the network's panicked response to the fact that advertisers are fleeing the show like rats from a factory that happens to specialize in manufacturing racist dog whistles.
This heartwarming story comes as a somewhat troubling development to CNN's Brian Stelter, though, who took to Reliable Sources on Sunday morning to wonder aloud whether this boycott amounts to a problematic attempt to suppress free speech.
Are ad boycotts the right answer here? I’m personally pretty wary of this. I think it’s dangerous to see these ad boycott attempts happening more and more often in this country. My view is, let's not shut down anyone's right to speak.
By organizing an advertiser boycott of The Ingraham Angle after its host tweeted some genuinely dumb and vile things about the teenage survivor of a mass shooting, David Hogg is not shutting down the Laura Ingraham's—or anyone else's—"right to speak." The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with the free press, and from otherwise meddling with an individual's right to publicly express themselves. Even as you read this sentence, Laura Ingraham remains as empowered as ever to impart her bad takes, whether to viewers on Fox News or to passers-by on the street, without fear of being arrested by agents of the state.
The First Amendment does not, however, protect Ingraham's right to make millions of dollars while doing so. This boycott has nothing to do with her civil liberties. It is an unequivocal repudiation by the free marketplace of ideas, a product of the same brand of cold, unfeeling capitalism for which Ingraham, in happier times, so cheerfully stumps. Stelter's position here conflates the controversial practice of no-platforming individual speakers on university campuses with a time-honored form of collective action undertaken in response to corporate malfeasance. Coming from a major news network's media correspondent, this type of uncritical distortion is disappointing.
He continues:
Let's meet their comments with more speech. Let's try and respond that way.
Set aside, for a moment, his implicit assertion that Ingraham called David Hogg a "whiner" as part of the polite, civilized, good-faith discourse in which she so often engages. How could those who do not have Ingraham's platform ever be expected to "meet" her comments their speech? Even if Hogg might be able match her clout—still a debatable-at-best proposition, given that he boasts one-third of her social media following and no eponymous cable news show—the vast majority of consumers who find her cyberbullying reprehensible cannot.
What Stelter fails to acknowledge is that in this context, a boycott is speech. It is the product of a coordinated response by millions of people who are exercising their First Amendment rights, intent on making clear to Ingraham and her Fox News overlords that this time, her actions have consequences that go beyond enduring another round of outraged Twitter replies. If a television personality's success depends on ad revenue, and if her viewers are sufficiently disgusted by her conduct to petition sponsors to pull their support, the host has a business decision to make about the wisdom of repeating that behavior in the future. Fortunately for Laura Ingraham, she has earned an entire week free from distractions and responsibilities in which she can figure out whether doing so is worth it.
