Sarah Palin launches her own ‘talk to me’ TV channel
Former vice-presidential candidate promises to tackle nation’s issues
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Your support makes all the difference.Sarah Palin has launched her own internet television channel, promising to tackle the “important issues facing the nation”, while also sharing with viewers some of the “fun” of the Palin household.
The 50-year-old former Governor of Alaska, 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee and bestselling author announced her new venture, The Sarah Palin Channel, in a video posted on Facebook on Sunday.
The interactive, subscription-based online network will be “a news channel that really is a lot more than news,” Ms Palin said. “This is a community where we’re going to be able to share ideas and discuss the issues of the day. And we’re going to find solutions.”
A SarahPalinChannel.com subscription will cost $9.95 (£5.86) per month or $99.95 annually; access to the network is being offered free to anyone currently serving in the US military. Subscribers can submit questions for Ms Palin and post their own videos on the site. “I want you to talk directly to me,” Ms Palin said. “That’s what I’m most anxious about – hearing from you. Together, we’ll go around the sound bites and cut through the media’s politically correct filter.”
To launch the network, Ms Palin partnered with Tapp, a new media group founded by former CNN president Jon Klein and Jeff Gaspin, who was previously the chairman of NBC Universal Television. Mr Klein and Mr Gaspin established Tapp earlier this year as a platform for high-profile people such as Ms Palin to create their own personal channels.
Ms Palin has long railed against what she terms the “lame-stream” media: those outlets that she believes unfairly criticised her 2008 candidacy. The Sarah Palin Channel would be an alternative to those sources, she promised, and will grapple with ideas “Washington doesn’t want you to hear”.
The website’s front page features a ticker totting up the national debt, alongside a clock counting down the days to the end of the Obama presidency. Among the videos already on the site is one entitled “We can’t be afraid of the scary ‘I Word’”, in which Ms Palin argues for President Barack Obama’s impeachment.
Ms Palin, who was mocked for her lack of foreign policy knowledge during the 2008 campaign, also posted a video explaining how the West ought to deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US could “make the world a safer place,” she suggested, by further developing its oil and natural gas industries in order to weaken Russian influence over international energy markets. “The only effective long-term strategy to rein-in Putin is to compete with him by developing our own natural resources,” she said.
The Sarah Palin Channel is expected to feature guest appearances from the former Governor’s friends and associates, as well as “fun” titbits from daily life in the Palin home, and from the family’s outdoorsy exploits in Alaska. The site also links to a blog by Ms Palin’s daughter, Bristol.
Another feature of the site is the word of the day which was “rectitude”. The image of the day is a group of men in 18th-century dress with guns and the quote, “Remember when the colonists stood in line to register their muskets?... Me either [sic].”
Ms Palin has returned to the public eye in recent months as she campaigns on behalf of Republican candidates ahead of the midterm congressional elections in November. Over the weekend she launched an attack on both the President and the media in a Facebook post that described the staff of The Washington Post as “a bunch of wusses”.
The newspaper, she claimed, has failed to investigate the Obama administration as energetically as it did Richard Nixon’s White House during the Watergate scandal four decades ago. “The list of Obama abuses and impeachable offences is long,” Ms Palin wrote. “I challenge you to lift a finger and help protect democracy, allow justice for all, and ensure domestic tranquillity by doing your job reporting current corrupt events fairly. If not, you prove yourselves incompetent and in bed with Obama, not caring one iota about media integrity.”
Ms Palin also revealed in a recent interview with Breitbart News that she had declined an offer to appear in the HBO vampire drama series, True Blood. “The brilliant minds of True Blood were brazen enough to ask me to do a cameo on their show, apparently so they could insult a conservative woman in person instead of just all conservative women in general,” she said, adding: “I’d put any mama grizzly in America against a vampire any day.”
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