After the Parkland shooting, journalists turned Hogg, who was still a child at the time, into an overnight expert on gun policy.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the media’s warm treatment of Parkland shooting survivor and gun-control activist David Hogg, and we cover more media misses.
David Hogg’s Big Promotion
Liberal media darling David Hogg has a new gig: The 24-year-old will serve as one of three vice chairs for the Democratic National Committee.
“It’s time we stop surrendering, go on offense, and take the fight to Donald Trump,” he wrote in a post on X. “We need to show [the public] who we are again, to rid our party of its judgmental attitudes, and do the work to win back every group we lost this year.”
“We’re going to show people that the reason people should vote for us isn’t just because we’re not Republicans — it’s because we’re damn Democrats. We give a s***,” he said. “And we deliver. Now it’s time to rebuild the party and to rethink the way we’ve been doing things.”
The leadership role is the culmination of seven years of political activism from Hogg, who is a survivor of the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
It quickly became clear that Hogg intended to translate his experience into super stardom in the wake of the devastating shooting. But Hogg wouldn’t have been able to pull it off without help from pro-gun-control allies in the media.
Less than two weeks out from the shooting, Hogg had already been invited on cable news again and again to discuss his views on gun policy.
NR reported of Hogg’s media blitz at the time:
Among the proposals that Hogg has advanced are that the most popular rifle in America be federally prohibited; that the NRA be regarded as a haven for “child murderers”; that Americans boycott Amazon, FedEx, and the state of Florida; and that Governor Rick Scott take responsibility for the failures of another elected official. In addition, Hogg has held a gun-control rally in New Jersey, slammed the president as a coward, criticized the federal response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico, made comments in support of funding for wind and solar power, taken a pre-emptive stand on Florida’s imminent senatorial election, and suggested that, as a matter of general policy, cops cannot be expected to protect the citizenry if they believe they might be outgunned.
His incoherent stance on gun reform earned Hogg — and his fellow Parkland shooting survivors who joined him in his activism — a feature on the April 2018 cover of Time magazine.
Months later, he was the subject of a lengthy New York magazine profile: “After Parkland Furious and unflinching, an NRA enemy, an accused ‘crisis actor,’ and a high-school grad trying to figure out what’s next.”
That Hogg clearly understood little about gun policy in the U.S. never stopped the media from touting him as a prolific activist on the issue.
As David Harsanyi wrote for NR in 2022:
Anti-gun activist David Hogg spent the weekend tweeting out his usual half-baked nonsense about guns. “If you need a license to kill deer why don’t you need one to kill humans?” and “Uteruses should not be more regulated than guns,” and other similar gems. Hogg, now a student at Harvard, is apparently under the impression that the Second Amendment sanctions murder and that pregnant women are subjected to background checks. It’s nearly impossible to engage in any genuine debate with emotionalist arguments so untethered from reality.
But when Marjorie Taylor Greene responded, encouraging Hogg to “try hanging out with actual deer hunters” to be “more masculine,” reporters quickly jumped to Hogg’s defense.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene Harangues School Shooting Survivor Over Gun Stance” Newsweek reported, while CNN gave Hogg a spot on air to demand that Greene apologize to the families of victims of gun violence.
Those impacted by the shooting who took a more conservative position were awarded no such media championing and were excluded from the growing movement born from the shooting.
Both survivor Kyle Kashuv and Hunter Pollack, the older brother of Meadow Pollack, who died shielding a classmate from bullets, were excluded from the inaugural March for Our Lives event, which drew hundreds of thousands of people.
Kashuv, a supporter of gun reform and school safety, criticized Hogg at the time for “egregious and inflammatory” rhetoric. He also criticized Hogg for hanging up on a call from the Trump White House inviting Hogg to a school safety event.
“It paints a bad light on our entire generation,” he said. “Guns aren’t the issue. It’s everything surrounding acquiring a weapon. . . . Where was the call for no more failures by law enforcement?”
While Hogg and other students who advocated for gun-control measures found themselves splashed across broadcast and print media, Kashuv was only welcome at Fox News and other conservative outlets. In fact, CNN canceled a planned segment with Kashuv in 2018 after someone at the network reportedly took offense to one of his retweets on Twitter, according to the Daily Signal.
Kashuv, if anything, became an enemy in the eyes of the media after screenshots of slurs and racist language he used as a 16-year-old made their way online.
After Harvard rescinded its offer of admission to Kashuv over the brouhaha, the Washington Post’s Christine Emba wrote, “Kyle Kashuv deserves some sympathy. But that’s about all.”
While Kashuv painted the situation as being “about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me,” Emba didn’t see an opportunity for forgiveness for the teen.
“I feel bad for Kyle Kashuv,” Emba wrote. “He is still young, after all, and having his college admission rescinded is surely disappointing, embarrassing and stressful. But do I think that it justifies so much Internet hue and cry, or that Harvard should reinstate his place in the class of 2023? Not at all.”
Meanwhile, Hogg’s radical leftism earned him his own spot at Harvard and 1 million followers on X. He currently serves as the president of Leaders We Deserve.
His election to the DNC is evidence Democrats have learned little from their November shellacking.
He represents the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party. In 2020, Hogg called to “Defund the police not USPS” and to “Abolish ICE.”
Jim Geraghty offers his own prediction for the Hogg-era at the DNC:
Meanwhile, David Hogg is likely to keep doing what he does best, insisting that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual’s right to own a firearm, arguing that the National Rifle Association is a terrorist organization, and making ill-informed and hard-left controversial statements on social media.
Headline Fail of the Week
Newsweek published a disturbingly friendly profile of Steven Joseph Hayes, a man who was previously on death row after he killed a Connecticut mother and her two daughters during an attempted burglary.
“Exclusive: Transgender Connecticut Killer on Life in Prison: ‘Happy to Be Alive,’” the outlet reports of Hayes, who now identifies as a woman named Linda Mai Lee.
Hayes, who had his death sentence commuted to life without parole in 2015, told the outlet he is now “comfortable living as a woman.”
“For the first time in my life I am happy to be alive and do not want to die,” he told Newsweek.
“This man held a family of four hostage in their home for hours, beating them, raping the 11 year old daughter and the mother, then strangling the mother, and finally setting the house on fire, killing both children from smoke inhalation,” civil liberties attorney Laura Powell wrote. “Newsweek now publishes a puff piece on how he is now happy and at peace since he came to terms with his gender confusion. They claim his ‘former anger’ had been fueled by this distress. Now he is seeking treatments to feminize his appearance. (Undoubtedly funded by taxpayers.) You don’t hate the media enough.”
Media Misses