Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has come under fire from Charles Segars, the CEO of arts network Ovation, after calling for the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts on the Fox show "Hannity."
Segars lambasted Palin in an official announcement, calling her comments "uninformed rhetoric."
"While it's not surprising that those hungry for constant media attention, like Sarah Palin, would use the misguided words of one former NPR employee as fodder to call the entire organization a mouth piece for the Left, I am surprised that she would go so far as to extend this thinking to the NEA," Segars lamented.
"She has called the NEA 'frivolous' and said it should be cut," he added. "This kind of knee-jerk, uninformed rhetoric is the stuff of cheap-shot campaign commercials. America's arts sector is a huge driver of our economy and proposed cuts to the NEA don't take into account the substantial return on investment those funds generate in tax revenue to local, state and federal treasuries. Shame on her for turning the arts into partisan politics."
Palin's comments came on March 10, just a day after NPR CEO Vivian Schiller was ousted, following a video sting operation by right-wing provocateur James O'Keefe. (O'Keefe captured NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller — no relation to Vivian — making disparaging remarks about Tea Party members while speaking to what he thought was a Muslim group.)
According to Palin, O'Keefe's "gotcha" moment only served to highlight why groups like NPR and the NEA don't deserve federal funds.
"I think it's quite revealing of what the agenda there at NPR has been all these years. And it's kind of refreshing to see some proof of that," Palin told host Sean Hannity. "NPR, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of frivolous things that government shouldn't be in the business of funding with tax dollars — those should all be on the chopping block as we talk about the $14 trillion debt that we're going to hand to our kids and our grandkids. Yes, those are the type of things that for more than one reason need to be cut."
