#FACTS. Kim Kardashian slammed the Wall Street Journal for running an ad denying Turkey’s Armenian genocide in a heated blog post published on her website on Wednesday, April 27.
“My family and I are no strangers to BS in the press. We've learned to brush it off. Lies make good headlines, good headlines make great covers, great covers sell magazines,” the reality TV superstar, 35, wrote. “But when I heard about this full-page ad that ran in the Wall Street Journal denying the Armenian genocide, I couldn't just brush it off.”
The 101st anniversary of the Armenian genocide was earlier this month, on April 24. The tragic event, in which an estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed, began in 1915 and lasted for years. (Turkey does not officially recognize the Armenian genocide.)
Kardashian’s late father, Robert Kardashian — who died in 2003 at age 59 from esophageal cancer — was the son of Helen and Arthur Kardashian, whose grandparents migrated to the United States from Armenia in the early 1900s. The Selfish author has long been vocal about her heritage and its importance to her.
“The ad was paid for by Turkic Platform. I won't list the group's website, as I don't want to give them the traffic, but basically they say that not as many people died as historians say, and that the Armenians were to blame,” the E! personality continued on her site. “For the Wall Street Journal to publish something like this is reckless, upsetting and dangerous. It's one thing when a sh–ty tabloid profits from a made-up scandal, but for a trusted publication like WSJ to profit from genocide — it's shameful and unacceptable. Why is it that every time we take one step forward, we take two steps back?”
Kardashian and her younger sister Khloé Kardashian memorably visited Armenia and met with the country’s prime minister, Hovik Abrahamyan, during an April 2015 trip that was documented for Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
"We accept a wide range of advertisements, including those with provocative viewpoints,” WSJ told Gawker in a statement defending their choice to run the ad. “While we review ad copy for issues of taste, the varied and divergent views expressed belong to the advertisers."
Kardashian was not pleased with the publication’s response. “Advocating the denial of a genocide by the country responsible for it—that's not publishing a ‘provocative viewpoint,’ that's spreading lies,” she added. “It's totally morally irresponsible and, most of all, it's dangerous. If this had been an ad denying the Holocaust, or pushing some 9/11 conspiracy theory, would it have made it to print?”