Laura Ingraham announced Friday night that she will be taking a week off from her Fox News show, The Ingraham Angle, for “Easter break.”
“I’ll be off next week for Easter break with my kids but fear not, we’ve got a great line up of guest hosts to fill in for me,” Ingraham said during Friday’s show.
The Fox News host’s break is suspiciously timed, coinciding with an onslaught of more than a dozen advertisers pulling support for her show.
Major companies like TripAdvisor, Hulu, Expedia, and Liberty Mutual have dropped Ingraham’s show from their advertising plans in the wake of recent comments from Ingraham mocking Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg.
Liberty Mutual, for example, told employees Friday that it would no longer advertise on Ingraham’s show, calling her comments “inconsistent with our values as a company.”
On Wednesday, Ingraham mocked 17-year-old Hogg for getting rejected by four colleges. In response, Hogg called for his supporters to boycott the companies who advertise on Ingraham’s show.
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018
After companies began dropping The Ingraham Angle, Ingraham eventually offered an apology to Hogg. She claims she was moved by the “spirit of Holy Week” to apologize — though she said she was sorry only for potentially hurting his feelings, not for calling him a whiner.
“Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —including David Hogg. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” she tweeted.
Hogg was unimpressed with Ingraham’s apology.
“She only apologized after we went after advertisers,” he told The New York Times in an interview Thursday. “It kind of speaks for itself.”
After learning of Ingraham’s Easter break, Hogg tweeted he hoped she would have some “healthy reflections” during Holy Week.
Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week. https://t.co/bjSLmj3gyH
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 31, 2018
Laura Ingraham is not the first Fox News host to take a suspiciously timed break from the show.
Shortly after The New York Times announced Billy O’Reilly and Fox News paid millions of dollars to five women who said they were sexually harassed by O’Reilly, 77 advertisers left the show in a mass exodus.
O’Reilly subsequently announced he would be taking a “scheduled” vacation that he had planned — but he never returned. O’Reilly was supposed to return on April 24 of last year, but on April 19, Fox News let him go.