The Tennessean newspaper is investigating an ad it published that said Islam was going to launch a nuclear attack on Nashville.
Kevin Gentzel, the president of marketing solutions and chief revenue officer for Gannett, which owns The Tennessean, did damage control on social media not long after the ad appeared in the paper.
The ad which was purchased by the group Future For America also said President Donald Trump “is the final president of the USA.”
“Two ads ran this week in the Tennessean that clearly violate our advertising standards,” Gentzel tweeted. “We strongly condemn the message and apologize to our readers. We are immediately investigating to determine how this could have happened.”
The ad began with a claim that a nuclear weapon would be detonated in Nashville and an attack would hit certain targets of "Islam."
“The advertisement that was placed within the Tennessean is not what we condone or stand for within our advertising department guidelines and procedures,” Ryan Kedzierski, vice president of sales for middle Tennessee, told The Tennessean.
Kedzierski continued, “This advertisement should not have been published within The Tennessean and we are sincerely sorry that this mistake took place. We are extremely apologetic to the community that the advertisement was able to get through and we are reviewing internally why and how this occurred and we will be taking actions immediately to correct.
“No words or actions can describe how sorry we are to the community for the advertisements that were published. We will be utilizing the advertising dollars that went toward the full-page ad placements and donating those funds to the American Muslim Advisory Council.”
On Wednesday, the organization also ran an ad that it was alerting Nashville residents of the terroristic event “so that they may be able to make a decision intelligently.”
Company management is investigating the ad, which was pulled from later editions of the paper.
“Clearly there was a breakdown in the normal processes, which call for careful scrutiny of our advertising content,” Michael A. Anastasi, vice president and editor, told The Tennessean.
He added, “The ad is horrific and is utterly indefensible in all circumstances. It is wrong, period, and should have never been published. It has hurt members of our community and our own employees and that saddens me beyond belief. It is inconsistent with everything The Tennessean as an institution stands and has stood for and with the journalism we have produced.”
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