In an interview with the NRA’s Dana Loesch on Friday, a faculty member of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School said that “a lot” of students from the school have said privately that the gun control student activists featured prominently in the media “don’t speak for all students.”
“There have been a lot of my students that have spoken to me about it privately, and they’ve told me word for word as well as paraphrasing that these kids don’t speak for all students,” the teacher told Loesch in an interview for her show “Relentless” highlighted by The Daily Caller.
The teacher suggested that some students who were in direct danger during the shooting spree, unlike most of the prominent activists, have a different perspective on the issue, but their voices are not being heard.
“I have students in my class that were shot, but you don’t see them. They have the most personal experience of anyone except for [Samantha Fuentes],” said the faculty member.
The constant media focus on the prominent activists and the school, the teacher said, has made the healing process all the harder. “Every single day since we’ve come back to school, I have kids out in the hall crying because of the emotional toll that it’s taken, and we haven’t started to heal yet, because we’re in the news every single day, and every single day there are helicopters circling overhead,” the faculty member said.
As The Daily Beast highlighted last week, other students at the high school have raised similar complaints. A group of African American students say they feel the media has ignored them. The black student activists, represented by the Broward Black Lives Matter Alliance, held a press conference that they say the mainstream media ignored; only local media attended. Meanwhile, movement leaders like David Hogg, one of the activists claimed, have not invited them to join in on the conversation.
“Don’t get me wrong [David], I appreciate your gesture of calling out the media for the lack of black faces in the aftermath of the incident at our school,” Tyah-Amoy Roberts wrote on Twitter. “But I don’t recall (nor do any of our black peers at Douglas) getting any invites from you to [sic].”
Among the most vocal of the gun control advocates from the school are Cameron Kasky, Emma Gonzalez, and Hogg, who has gained even more extensive coverage over the least week after launching an advertiser boycott campaign against Fox News’ Laura Ingraham because she poked fun at him for getting rejected by four colleges in California. Despite her apology, Hogg has continued to promote the campaign, aided by Media Matters, Think Progress, and other progressive activist organizations.
