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The first shots rang out at 2:22 PM on Valentine’s Day 2018, as a lone gunman began laying siege to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Armed with an AR-15 rifle, the former student spent the next six minutes firing as he roamed the campus, killing 17 people and wounding many more, in one of the most chilling mass murders in U.S. history.
It was only a matter of days before Fox News was leading a right-wing media crusade to vilify the Parkland survivors as they raised their angry teenage voices about gun violence in America.
Immediately signaling that they were part of a larger awakening, and determined to address runaway gun violence in America, as well as the politicians and special interests that allow it to go unchecked, the outspoken students posed a new kind of pressing threat to right-wing propaganda. And that opened the door to conservative attacks, as GOP-friendly media outlets routinely smeared and maligned a new generation of activists who had suffered unspeakable losses.
On the one-year anniversary of the shocking and senseless school shooting in Florida, it's important to remember how key media actors behaved in its aftermath. It's important to recall that, when faced with a national tragedy, players at Fox News and elsewhere instinctively moved to engage in revenge politics and to tear the country further apart.
What's also so important about the dark Parkland chapter of the country’s story is that these students stood up to Fox News bullies—and the students won. Just ask Laura Ingraham.
She was hardly alone. After the massacre, Fox News star Tucker Carlson quickly denounced the students as “self-righteous kids” who “weren’t helping at all” and compared them to Mao's Red Guards, the armed revolutionary youth organization that flourished during the repressive Cultural Revolution in communist China. He also belittled the Parkland students as "human shields"—and that was only one week after the gun massacre.
"Spare me if I don't want to hear the sanctimoniousness of a 17-year-old,” Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth later announced.
It wasn't just Fox News. In St. Louis, conservative radio host Jamie Allman, whose commentaries were aired on the local Sinclair Broadcast Group television station, threatened to “ram a hot poker up David Hogg’s ass.” In the mindless corners of the conservative media, a lavish conspiracy theory was hatched, claiming that the Parkland activists had lied about the gun massacre, and Hogg was an out-of-state actor. RedState suggested he wasn't even at the high school at the time of the murders. That insanity was dubbed "Lie of the Year" by PolitiFact in 2018.
All of the callous attacks appeared to be closely coordinated with the NRA, which was busy depicting Parkland survivors as criminals.
The ugly crusade took a bizarre turn last year when Hogg's home was the target of a "swatting" attack. That's the dangerous, and sometimes deadly, tactic where anonymous online trolls contact the police and falsely claim that an armed siege is playing out at the target’s address. Armed police, often led by SWAT teams, soon surround the address, assuming a gunman is inside.
Just a few years ago it would have been unthinkable, even for the GOP partisan press, to spring into action following a school gun massacre and immediately target the surviving students, tagging them as the true enemies of liberty. But the conservative movement's march to the radical fringes has only intensified under Trump, and today all the guardrails protecting common decency have been taken down. What's so telling about the hateful crusade against Parkland survivors is how the right-wing media is no longer content to engage in wildly dishonest attacks on Democrats and progressives in the name of hardball politics (e.g., Benghazi, "death panels," etc.). Instead, the right-wing media, led by Fox News, sees all facets of American life as fair game for relentless denigration.
Even grieving high school students.
As for Ingraham, the Fox News host helped lead the charge to taunt and demean the student activists last year. Then she sparked widespread controversy when she publicly mocked Parkland activist Hogg after it was reported that he was rejected by several colleges he applied to. What kind of grown woman does that to a teenage mass murder survivor who's trying to make sure his fellow students weren't gunned down in vain?
After denouncing as "Stalinists" the activists who quickly led an advertising boycott of her show, Ingraham soon took a “vacation” and then offered up a limited apology. But it didn’t work. Seven months after the attacks first started, Politico reported that Ingraham's program, The Ingraham Angle, was airing one-third fewer commercials compared to before her self-inflicted Parkland “controversy.” All told, the show shed more than 150 advertisers that had previously appeared on her program, including Geico, Arby’s, Liberty Mutual, and Humira.
A Fox News spokeswoman at the time tried to spin the defeat as Ingraham suddenly wanting to air fewer commercials on her show. But that's nonsense. Nobody in the cable news business wants to generate less revenue for his or her boss, because that's a path that leads to cancellation. Just ask Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.
Meanwhile, the students' hard work is paying off. Sean Kirkendall, policy director of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told PolitiFact that a key bill introduced in Congress in 2017 to expand background checks on gun purchasers now has more than 200 co-sponsors, following the Parkland tragedy and after students there launched their campaign.
Parkland survivors are helping to change the conversation about guns in America—and Fox News bullies can't stop them.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.