Laura Ingraham Nearly Lost Her Fox News Career Over This Shady Comment

"The Ingraham Angle" remains one of Fox News' signature primetime shows, but it was close to disappearing less than one year into its run. After premiering in October 2017, it didn't take long for host Laura Ingraham, who's lived through her fair share of tragedy, to stir up some serious controversy. As detailed by NPR, in March 2018, she threw some serious shade at a high school student, tweeting, "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.)"

But Hogg wasn't just some random teenager. Instead, he was a survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which had occurred just one month prior. His response was swift and media-savvy, as he listed 12 of Ingraham's advertisers on X, formerly Twitter, and asked his followers to put pressure on them. In the ensuing fallout, a number of major companies announced they would stop advertising on "The Ingraham Angle," including Johnson & Johnson, Wayfair, and Hulu. Despite Ingraham's button-pushing reputation, it was clear to many that she had gone too far. As NPR's David Folkenflik explained, "This is just sort of personal. It's not just disdain. It's contempt for a guy who's only in the public eye for what he's endured and what he's decided to do about it."

Laura Ingraham ultimately apologized to Hogg on X, then-Twitter, the day after her initial remark, but a year after the brouhaha, her show still had not fully recovered. As TheWrap detailed, her overall viewership numbers actually increased slightly, although making money off those eyeballs was another story. Before the advertiser boycott, "The Ingraham Angle" averaged about 15 minutes of commercial time per episode, but that dwindled to just 10 and a half minutes for the first quarter of 2019. Furthermore, the show was drawing 40 percent fewer advertisers than it had in February 2018.

By 2025, however, Ingraham was performing comfortably enough to leave this controversy in the rearview. (Although she has made some unforgettable live TV gaffes in the years since, hers isn't the only explosive scandal that completely rocked the network.) In the second quarter of 2025, her total viewership was a few hundred thousand higher than where she stood back in 2019. As for Hogg, Ingraham's needling certainly did not hold back his educational ambitions. He went on to attend perhaps the most prestigious college in the country, Harvard University, which he graduated from in May 2023. He even made an appeal to Ingraham to donate to the March for Our Lives organization while holding his diploma on Instagram. Since then, Hogg transitioned to a career in activism and politics, including a stint as co-vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in early 2025.