The old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity may apply to Fox News Channel anchor Laura Ingraham.
Advertisers in droves began fleeing her political commentary show The Ingraham Angle, which airs weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern on Fox News, after Ingraham got into a petty and well-publicized social media dispute with a prominent Parkland high school gun control advocate, for which she subsequently apologized. The student, David Hogg, had already tweeted out a list of Ingraham advertisers, however, and the rest is history. He also apparently declined to accept her apology.
Ingraham reportedly lost 27 advertisers in the controversy, although MyPillow is sticking with her and Ace Hardware recently announced that it is resuming airing its commercials on her show. Parenthetically, there have also been calls for a counter-boycott.
In a statement, a Fox News exec previously said the network would “not allow voices to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts.” Ingraham also received support from an ideological foe, Bill Maher, who implied that she was the one who was being bullied and not the other way around.
Upon her return from an Easter week vacation that was supposedly pre-planned, Laura Ingraham’s ratings surged substantially, The Wrap reported.
“But in her return to the airwaves last week, she was up 25 percent in total viewers and 36 percent in the key 25-54 demo, compared to her averages for the first three months of the year. She averaged 3,099,000 total viewers and 685,000 in the 25-54 demo.”
Before the boycott, her show averaged 2.5 million viewers per broadcast, The Hill explained. The Hill added that many of the boycotting advertisers have merely shifted their commercials to other FNC programming.
The boycott was pushed “by Media Matters for America among other liberal-leaning groups,” the Washington Free Beacon noted.
Her show also received a huge spike on Friday night with coverage of the allied bombing raid on Syria, resulting in The Ingraham Angle being the No. 1 show on cable news with about 4.7 million viewers and 1 million-plus in the demo, the Washington Times reported.
A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a speechwriter in the Reagan administration, Ingraham, 54, also anchored her own program on MSNBC in the 1990s and was a longtime Fox News contributor and substitute host before The Ingraham Angle launched from the network’s D.C. studios on October 30, 2017. Along with a syndicated radio show, she is an author of several best-sellers and the founder of the LifeZette website and was a political commentator on ABC’s This Week.
Ingraham’s “angle” is that she is a champion of President Trump’s populist agenda and a critic of Never Trump/globalist Republicans and liberal Democrats alike. The single mother of three is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia law school.
Last night during the handoff from Sean Hannity (which often gets awkward because of Hannity’s overtalking), Laura Ingraham quipped that the Michael Cohen controversy took her off the hook. For those fans or haters watching his hour-long show in real time, Hannity cleverly waited until the last few minutes to claim that he never retained Trump lawyer Cohen as his attorney and just had sporadic, informal conversations with him, mostly about real estate.