CNN’s Joan Walsh ‘Likes’ Tweet Slamming Parkland Survivor Kyle Kashuv

Kyle Kashuv, Joan Walsh split
Ian Mason

Leftist CNN contributor Joan Walsh has dragged her network into the widening net of competing boycott campaigns after she “liked” a tweet from one Parkland, Florida shooting victim’s father criticizing a survivor.

Sixteen-year-old conservative survivor Kyle Kashuv slammed Walsh Sunday for having “liked” a tweet from Frank Guttenberg, whose daughter Jamie was murdered in last month’s deadly mass shooting at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School, calling Kashuv “handled” and “pushed” to take the stances he has.

In response, Walsh engaged with Kashuv, accusing him of “policing” Guttenberg’s tweets.

The remarks potentially pull CNN into the controversy over criticizing Parkland’s politically active teenage survivors that kicked off when Fox News’s Laura Ingraham retweeted an article claiming Parkland shooting survivor and now-liberal activist David Hogg was “whining” about not getting into college. Hogg launched an as-of-writing broadly successful boycott campaign against Ingraham’s advertisers for the tweet, supported by left-wing activist groups like Media Matters for America and Sleeping Giants.

The scandal grew when a Vanity Fair editor was caught making a series of tweets attacking Kashuv. In response, conservatives on Twitter launched a counter-boycott of Vanity Fair and MSNBC, for whom Eichenwald recently served as a commentator. At least one company, skin-care firm Proactiv, pulled ads over the uproar.

Conservatives on Twitter quickly drew comparisons to these earlier incidents, with some calling for CNN advertiser boycotts.

Like Ingraham, Walsh is a network pundit, positioned on the “opinion” or “punditry” side of programming. She has a long history in leftist journalism, writing for the arch-liberal newsweekly The Nation, serving as editor-in-chief of pioneering left-wing site Salon, and authoring books such as What’s the Matter with White People? She joined CNN after losing a long-time contributorship with MSNBC.

Some Twitter users latched onto Walsh’s status as a pundit to defend her move.

No advertisers as of yet have indicated they will break with CNN over Walsh’s remarks, but the new calls for boycotts were presaged by CNN host Brian Stetler when he expressed his misgivings Sunday about the raft of boycott campaigns justified by perceived social media slights.

The network is no stranger to these type of social media outrage campaigns. Last year, CNN itself devoted hours of airtime to a meme President Donald Trump tweeted with the liberal news channel’s logo superimposed over a defeated WWE wrestler. CNN claimed the meme raised “questions” about “racism, bigotry, and violence … [and] antisemitism” and one CNN reporter, Andrew Kaczynski, went so far as to threaten to publicly expose or “dox” the man who created the image Trump used if he did not stick to his promise to not “repeat his ugly behavior again on social media.”

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