Boycotts, Hairspray and Gun violence

By Hank Silverberg

      It has been an interesting week. The baseball season opened, the weather turned from spring, to winter and back to spring again, and a teenage high school student became the target of an uninformed TV talk show host with political aspirations. So after all the yelling on TV, re-arranging the coat closet and disappointment over opening day scores, it was time for a diversion. My wife suggested that we watch a DVD of the musical, “Hairspray.”  I have seen it several times before, but it’s always entertaining to watch John Travolta dancing around the screen as a zaftig woman .The movie was not a diversion this time.  

     If you don’t know the storyline of “Hairspray,” it’s about a young, overweight girl named Tracy, who lives in segregated Baltimore in the early 1960’s, whose only desire in life is to dance on a local TV show sponsored by a hairspray company. Her weight has made her the subject of discrimination similar to the black teenagers she meets and befriends, who are also not allowed to dance on the same show with white kids. The station owner doesn’t want to anger the show’s sponsor, a hairspray company.  And that, in a roundabout way, brings me to Laura Ingraham, the Fox News talk show host.
     Ingraham also has a radio show and runs Lifezette, an on-line “news” organization. If you follow politics, it’s no secret that Ingraham is Conservative. She pushes a right-wing agenda in all three formats, has been talked about as a candidate for the U-S Senate and has a substantial following. Her future is now in doubt because of one stupid, uniformed insult to David Hogg. He is one of the very vocal and visible leaders of the anti-gun violence movement begun by Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School students after the Valentines Day violence that killed 17 people.    

  Ingraham chastised Hogg because the young man , who has a 4.2 high school GPA, has yet to be accepted to any of the colleges to which he applied. The exchange is not worth repeating here, but she was basically bullying a teenager, attacking his character instead of his position on gun control.  Debate and Public Speaking experts will tell you such ad hominem attacks on character don’t work and often backfire. In this case, it did. 

  Hogg, showing perhaps more political savvy than Ingraham, immediately called on her advertisers to boycott her show. Advertisers, whether on fictional musicals or real life television, don’t want to be associated with anything negative or controversial that might chase away consumers, so a significant number of sponsors bailed out of “Ingraham’s Angle.” Ingraham apologized and then took a previously unannounced “vacation” from her show.

(Montgomery, bus boycott 1955) 

  This week, 50 years since Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated there will be a number of retrospectives, looking back on the Civil Rights Movement. We will likely hear again about Dr. King’s involvement in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955. It began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on that city’s segregated bus system. That boycott hit the city’s budget  hard, and eventually led to integration of the Montgomery’s transit system. Every high school student has read about this protest and its impact on the road to ending legal segregation. It was among the first uses of such a tactic in the United States to attack the bottom line--money-- and sway both public policy and public opinion.     

    When sponsors began dropping off Ingraham’s show, some in the broadcasting industry including many "talking heads" sent out alarms. They talked about free speech, the dangers of letting advertisers control program content and the damage it would do. 
     It’s a false alarm. Ingraham is NOT a journalist.She is a talk show host on a network that does not try to hide it’s political slant. We are not talking about the content of fair and objective reporting of the news of the day. This is not about journalism or even the news business. Fox has plenty of sponsors and viewers who have the right to speak with their pocket books and remote control buttons. Ingraham is not being criticized for being a Second Amendment crusader. She tried to bully a teenage crime victim. Hogg, who is after all a teenage high school student, has made some factual mistakes in his gun control arguments, and pointing those out is fair. But Ingraham crossed the line when she attacked the content of David Hogg’s character instead of his position on gun control.  That shows a great deal about HER character and advertisers and viewers have the right to decide if they want to be associated with that kind of bullying. Maybe that hastily planned vacation will help her.       

                                    (You comments and suggestions for blog topics are welcome)



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  The Vice-President of the United States is conflicted. She has risen to her current job by jumping on the bandwagon with President Andrew Freeman who is now, waging war against America’s biggest enemy—Iran.  Amy Roosevelt must make a decision whether to stay with Freeman or challenge him for the nomination. Though back channels she learns that the President’s health is declining. As Roosevelt ponders her decision, a conservative back bench Congressman from Missouri breaks out of the wanna-bees in the other party and also decides to run.  All this plays out as the man known only as Ishmael, continues his campaign of violence.