TV Station Pulls Ad for Tourism in South Africa
KCBS-TV reported it is pulling from the air a commercial placed by the South Africa Tourist Bureau promoting travel in the racially divided country.
A spokeswoman for the CBS-owned Los Angeles station Thursday said the 30-second ad initially was approved for broadcast and had been running sporadically during the last several weeks but that Channel 2 management had second thoughts and decided that the spot “might be offensive to a significant portion of our audience . . . because of the current political situation in South Africa.”
A few protest letters and calls had come in, the spokeswoman said, but she denied that they were the principal factor in KCBS-TV’s change of mind about the ad.
A spokeswoman for KABC-TV, Channel 7, said that station also was running the travel ad and would continue to do so.
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