Sarah Palin Calls Her Newsweek Cover Photo 'Sexist'

Sarah Palin landed a coveted Newsweek cover during her full-scale Book Tour blitz for Going Rogue, but apparently it's not the type of image she wants to portray. Palin took to her Facebook page last night and blasted the "out-of-context" cover as "sexist."

Posing in skimpy running shorts, the photograph was originally published in the August 2009 issue of Runners World. It was part of a multi-photograph slideshow that accompanied an article about Palin.

In her Facebook post, Palin said she had a problem with a news magazine like Newsweek using a photo from an article about health and fitness to promote an analysis piece contemplating her relevance as a political figure:

Palin writes: The choice
of photo for the cover of this week's Newsweek is unfortunate. When it
comes to Sarah Palin, this "news" magazine has relished focusing on the
irrelevant rather than the relevant. The Runner's World magazinehealth and fitness
-- a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to
this nation.

The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and
oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows
why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin.
The media will do anything to draw attention -- even if out of context.

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham told Yahoo! News that the photo choice was simply the "most interesting image available" and that "we chose the
most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the
cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to
photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."