Fox News show host mocks student

By PATRICIA SANTANA

Fox News weeknight host Laura Ingraham is embroiled in a controversy after mocking Parkland student activist David Hogg’s college rejections.

Ingraham retweeted an article posted by right-wing website The Daily Wire with the headline “Gun Rights Provocateur David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied.”

“David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it,” Ingraham commented in her retweet. “Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.”

Soon after, Hogg took to Twitter to ask his followers to ask companies who advertise during Ingraham’s show to pull their ads. Many of these companies, such as Hulu and TripAdvisor, have already listened to the public outcry and are now boycotting Ingraham’s show.

Ingraham has since apologized on Twitter for her comments. Hogg has not accepted her apology, stating that “an apology in an effort to save your advertisers is not enough” and that he will only accept the apology if Ingraham denounces the way Fox News has treated the student activists from Parkland.

Most of the drama in this story played out on Twitter. Ingraham’s initial comments and apology, Hogg’s responses and calls to boycott, and some companies’ statements of pulling their support were all tweets.

As a result, most news organizations have embedded many of the tweets in their coverage of the story. I found that the more tweets a news organization embedded, the more engaging I found the article.

For example, The Washington Post included the most tweets out of any of the articles I read, and I found that that was the article I enjoyed most. Being able to see the exact tweets allowed me to see the article Ingraham retweeted and click on it, making the story more interactive. It also made for a visually appealing article since the embedded tweets broke up the blocks of text.

Other outlets, such as The New York Times and CNN, included only one tweet. I found that decision puzzling given how much of the story played out on Twitter and it made the stories a duller read.

I also found that embedding the tweets made the articles flow better, since tweets can be very awkward to quote due to their conversational nature and usage of links and hashtags.