Armenian Genocide Billboard Near Memorial Taken Down

BOSTON, MA - Clear Channel Outdoor has taken down a Boston billboard that links to a site denying Armenian genocide in World War I, to the outrage of many who spotted the ad.

Adding insult to injury, the billboard appeared just up the street from Boston's Armenian Heritage Park on the Greenway, where a sculpture stands in commemoration of the lives lost. A URL listed on the board leads to a site that seeks to muddy the historic record on mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire (today, Turkey).

You can find a primer on the goals of the group behind the sign, "Fact Check Armenia," here.

The Boston Globe reports the billboard operator, Clear Channel, is taking the sign down, calling its placement an "error."

Clear Channel previously faced a similar conundrum in Cambridge, but on the opposite side of the debate.

According to Armenian Weekly, the company removed what it categorized as a "political awareness" sign from Lechmere station. That sign urged the U.S. government to recognize the World War I-era mass killing of Armenians as genocide.

Clear Channel Outdoor, a San Antonio-based advertising company under iHeart Media Inc., is no stranger to such politicized waters. In 2012, it took down ads in several Midwestern states that included misleading information on voter fraud, and in 2014 it removed ads it had donated to a Massachusetts campaign against gun violence.

>> Photo courtesy @CarCarll