Fox News targeted students in school walkouts for gun control

On Wednesday morning, students all over the country left their schools for 17 minutes to commemorate the deaths of students and staff of Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (one minute for each murder committed by the gunman), and to make an appeal for stricter gun control legislation. Wednesday night, Fox News went gunning for the students, ridiculing their protest. Tucker Carlson devoted the first segment of his 8 p.m. hour to scoffing at the sincerity of the students, calling them dupes of the Democrats. He exhorted his viewers, saying, “You should be against this!,” as chyrons at the bottom of the screen read “Political Props” and “The Left Is Exploiting Children.” Carlson continues to push the idea that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students who’ve spearheaded this newly energized gun-control movement are too young, too immature, too stupid to do their own thinking on the matter.

At 9 p.m., Sean Hannity was doing his usual thing — extrapolating absurdity from fact. Beginning with the fact of the student walkouts, he immediately jumped to the notion that, because Democratic politicians who joined the protestors had security details, all of them were “hypocrites.” If “gun-grabbing Democrats” (as he called them) use security people, Hannity thinks they are therefore “denying the same protection for American schoolchildren.” Hannity is very much in favor of armed teachers in schools, if you didn’t guess that.

Laura Ingraham followed at 10, and she also followed the Fox playbook: Ascribe the event to another protest that Fox hates. “Don’t be fooled into thinking this was an organic outpouring of youthful rage,” Ingraham said. “This was a totally choreographed event organized by a group called Empower — it’s the youth wing of the women’s march.” She accused the students of being antieducation and of being “hysterical”: “Who needs Homer and history when you can get credit for screaming? … Students need more academic time and less hysterics.” And then she revealed the true Fox News fear: “Democrats are using these kids to whip up enthusiasm for the midterms, 2020, and beyond, and of course for voter registration. It’s theater, but with real-world consequences.” There it is: voter registration is bad, and protest is never sincere — it’s “theater.”Fox also gave airtime to conservo-nerd Ben Shapiro to say that “the media … are activating these kids, and putting them out on the front lines, and putting them in photo ops, so that they can essentially use them as political human shields.” (Hey students, diagram that sentence for me: Human shields for whom? The media? Talking heads like Shapiro? And shields against what? Not explained. D+, Mr. Shapiro.)

Fox News’s primetime lineup — complete with replays of some of these segments on Thursday morning’s Fox & Friends — found ways to deny students all across the country any sense of purpose, intelligence, activism, their respect for the dead and civic responsibility, stomping on young idealism.