White House Says NEA Telecon With Artists About Politics Won't Happen Again

We've been following the fallout from the August 10 telecon with National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) officials and artists. Most recently, I blogged about it yesterday at the site Big Government, which released full audio and a transcript of the call, during which the NEA's communications director and others in the Obama administration encouraged participants to create art that would further the president's political agenda.

Here's the latest, from ABC News:

Today White House officials are meeting with the chiefs of staff of the executive branch agencies to discuss rules and best practices in this area, a conversation during which they will be told that that while White House lawyers do not believe that the NEA call violated the law, "the appearance issues troubled some participants," [White House spokesman Bill] Burton said. "It is the policy of the administration that grant decisions should be on the merits and that government officials should avoid even creating the incorrect appearance that politics has anything to do with these decisions."

After listening to the transcript and the audio posted at the conservative website BigHollywood.Breitbart.com—secretly recorded by Los Angeles filmmaker Patrick Couriellech—Melanie Sloan, executive director of the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told ABC News that the call was "disturbing."

"Government agencies are not supposed to be engaged in political activities," Sloan said. "Here, because they didn't veer off into 'This is about the election,' where you'd get into violations of the Hatch Act, it's not illegal. But it doesn't look good—it looks terrible. It's inappropriate."

Hat tip: Andrew Hazlett of The Occasional: Ideas, Art, and Culture in Interesting Times.