Posted: Sep. 2, 2008

It’s always hard for TV news to focus on more than one story at a time.

So it probably was a wise decision to scale back the first day of the Republican National Convention when it became clear that Hurricane Gustav was targeting the Louisiana coast.

The all-news channels offered wall-to-wall coverage of the storm through Monday afternoon, even though word broke early in the day that the 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin was pregnant.

Like it or not, that’s the kind of story that usually attracts way more cable attention than more serious stuff — and there’s going to be some political fallout.

But through much of the day, it was barely mentioned.

As for Monday afternoon’s truncated convention session, the closest thing to news came in speeches by Laura Bush and Cindy McCain, and the all-news channels cut back and forth between the two stories, focusing more on Gustav than the GOP. Those brief appearances focused on hurricane relief rather than politics.

The balancing act was obvious in the ABC and NBC network newscasts. “The CBS Evening News” was pre-empted on Channel 58 in Milwaukee by the MDA Telethon, but CBS reported that Katie Couric was anchoring from New Orleans, as were her competitors.

NBC’s Brian Williams anchored in shirtsleeves from a New Orleans street corner, leading with the hurricane and teasing the teen pregnancy story as “another surprise announcement from the McCain campaign.”

“Today would have been a very busy news day, of course, even without a hurricane passing over top of this region,” Williams said as he moved from the opening 10 minutes of storm coverage to the story of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, which got about two minutes of airtime.

ABC’s Charlie Gibson was in a Windbreaker on a balcony overlooking the French Quarter. He opened with the hurricane but also mentioned the Palin story in his opening, headlining the story as “Family Matters.”

ABC spent the first 12 minutes of the newscast on the hurricane, going to commercials before coming back to the Palin story.

“The revelation quickly drew a lot of surprise in the political world,” he said. Gibson asked political correspondent George Stephanopoulos whether Palin had been vetted sufficiently before the pick was announced on Friday.

“There are a lot of questions about that, Charlie. Some senior Republican operatives outside the campaign say there’s no way they could have had a complete vet with this kind of information coming out. Democrats say that . . . the McCain campaign didn’t even go through Gov. Palin’s local newspapers. So the big question here in the political world is ‘What else don’t we know about Gov. Palin?’ ”

Over on NBC, Williams went back at the Palin story some 23 minutes into the newscast, raising the vetting question with the network’s political guru, Chuck Todd.

“Now the worry is what else, is there something else that’s coming? But to the folks here,” Todd said from the convention hall in St. Paul, “these delegates in particular who are very excited about this pick, this doesn’t bother them at all.”

On a more normal news day, this story — especially the “what else” question — would have overshadowed everything else.

Reach Tim Cuprisin at (414) 224-2397 or tcuprisin@journalsentinel.com.