Throughout the day, kids have been walking out of schools—either with permission from teachers or without—to protest gun violence and the embarrassingly lax gun laws in our country that allow shootings like Parkland and Newtown to happen. To show their support for these young people, MTV and Nickelodeon both suspended all programming this morning for 17 minutes, one minute for each of the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month. The Los Angeles Times shared some tweets showing what the two networks aired instead of regular programming, with Nickelodeon taking a soft approach by simply saying it was going off the air “in support of kids leading the way”:
MTV, on the other hand, embraced the oppurtuity to get political by taking the 17 minutes to highlight young people across the country who are fighting against gun violence:
The blackout actually extended to all of Viacom’s networks, with Deadline quoting a statement from the company as saying it has “a long history of supporting young people’s movements around the world,” and so it decided to use “its substantial multi-platform footprint to support these extraordinary individuals and amplify the reach and impact of their activism.”