Fox News primetime host Laura Ingraham cut short an interview with an author and supporter of more safety protocols at the NFL when the guest in question decided to use his brief appearance to trash the network.
The moment occurred Monday evening when Ms Ingraham sat down with Steve Almond, author of Against Football and All the Secrets In The World. Mr Almond was there to argue his position that the NFL should institute further safety-related rules after Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills was hospitalised with a life-threatening injury during a game.
Instead, Mr Almond turned his fire on Fox News, and decided to compare the NFL’s concussion and brain injury issue with Fox News’s efforts to deal with personalities including most notably former The O’Reilly Factor host Bill O’Reilly when they are credibly accused of sexual harassment or other similar impropriety.
“It’s like at Fox News when you have hosts who are allegedly sexually harassing people,” said Mr Almond. “Fox News throws money at that to make that PR problem go away.”
As the conversation devolved further, Mr Almond went on to accuse Fox hosts of ginning up fears about a “mythic woke mob” — or Democrats and their policies in general. The network has been accused of as much many times, and still faces lingering backlash resulting from its coverage of supposed election fraud and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the months after it occurred.
The network also frequently is accused of spurring fears and anger against migrants thanks to its coverage of the issue of immigration and in particular the focus of its hosts on larger caravans of migrant families traveling together for safety.
“I’m focused on the fans and what I believe is not that any government ban is going to make football safer, and not some mythic woke mob that you mentioned to try to scare your viewers,” he said.
“That’s your entire economic model,” he insisted. “[T]o scare your viewers. That’s your whole gig.”
Somewhat shockingly, the host allowed the interview to continue until Mr Almond brought up the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and Ms Ingraham’s own public apology to survivor David Hogg after she mocked his nonacceptance to Harvard, ostensibly out of malice borne from anger over his political views.
“A couple of years when you taunted a survivor of the Parkland mass shooting, you apologised only because advertisers withdrew from your show,” he said.
The interview then ended with Ms Ingraham bizarrely insisting that her show was an open forum for those with any views.
It isn’t the first time a Fox guest’s interview has gone off the rails and ended with them insulting the network.
Earlier this year, another guest blamed the network’s opinion hosts for spreading the racist “Great Replacement theory”, which is believed to have led to the shooting in Buffalo, New York.
