Fox News: Months Prior to NEA Conf. Call White House Met With 60 Artists 'to promote the administration's agenda'

On Monday the 21st, Big Hollywood reported on a May 12 meeting of 60 artists with the NEA and the White House to help “promote the administration’s agenda” — the one where The Department of Alternative Thinking was proposed…

Today, the Washington Times compiled a long list of the invited artists who are grant recipients, and…

Fox News followed up with this report:

“Rappers, dancers, writers and other activists from around the country were invited to a May 12 session next door to the White House where they were “challenged to come up with promising and attractive ideas about how artists can work to promote the administration’s agenda.”

“The White House convened a meeting of 60 artists to help push the president’s domestic agenda in May, months before a controversial conference call with artists in August led to the reassignment and, on Thursday, the resignation of the communications director of the National Endowment for the Arts.

“In what some critics are calling a “troubling” early effort by the Obama administration to politicize the NEA, rappers, dancers, writers and other activists from around the country were invited to a May 12 session next door to the White House, where they were “challenged to come up with promising and attractive ideas about how artists can work for the administration’s agenda,” according to a report written by organizers of the meeting.

“An NEA official in charge of grants for performing artists was in attendance, as was the organization’s former chief spokesman, Yosi Sergant, who was reassigned last month after he led a similar conference call with 75 artists and urged them to promote Obama’s policies. The NEA announced Thursday that he had resigned.

“One participant in the May 12 session “suggested the people in the room equaled a think tank to serve the administration’s aims and asked how in practical terms we could connect to the administration’s work,” the report says.

“Government watchdogs said the meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building was a problematic and partisan use of the NEA, which is supposed to be politically neutral.

“”They didn’t violate a law but it doesn’t seem like a good idea,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It seems like they’re overly politicizing the NEA, and it seems inappropriate.”

“Sloan said it was “troubling” that the government-funded NEA was suggesting to artists who rely on it for aid that they make a push for the administration.”

You can read the full Fox News piece here.