Trump Ad Banned for Being 'Misleading' and Factually Incorrect
Real estate mogul Donald Trump will not be allowed to show a new ad opposing a recent decision to put wind turbines near his new billion dollar golf resort in Scotland.
The decision was handed down by Britain's Advertising Standards Agency after it ruled that the advertisement from Trump International Gold Club Scotland is misleading and should be removed from its current form.
"The ad must not appear again in its current form," the ASA said in a statement. "We told Trump International Golf Club Scotland Ltd not to make claims unless they could be substantiated with robust evidence and not to use misleading imagery."
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The ad uses a picture of a wind farm near a California highway that explains the wind farm will hurt tourism and be aesthetically unpleasing.
The Scottish ministries recently approved a plan that would put wind turbines off Scotland's shores, which Trump claims will adversely affect his billion dollar resort.
The ASA said that the claim "tourism will suffer" after analysis showed "there was little evidence of a negative effect and, over time, hostility to windfarms lessened and they became an accepted and even valued part of the scenery".
"While a concentration of windfarms might have serious implications for a limited number of individual households, the impact of windfarms on Scottish tourism was very small … because we had not received evidence that tourism would significantly suffer as a result of windfarms in Scotland we concluded that the claim had not been substantiated," the report added.
There were also complaints due to the ad featuring a picture of Scottish first minister Alex Salmond smiling while connecting him the horrific Lockerbie bombing.
The text underneath the picture states: "This is the same mind that backed the release of terrorist al-Megrahi, 'for humane reasons' – after he ruthlessly killed 270 people on Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie. Take action. Write, demonstrate and protest Alex Salmond."
