Pregnant Pause

MINNEAPOLIS, Sept. 2-- Over breakfast in the shadow of the Mall of America, some reporters were wondering how long it would take for the Sarah Palin pregnancy rumors to hit the staid old MSM.

Not for awhile, I said. Having lived through the long Rielle Hunter gestation period, I doubted any mainstream type was going to rush into print with an unsubstantiated story that the recently pregnant governor of Alaska had not really been pregnant after all. And with the convention curtailed for Monday and the hurricane all over cable, I was looking forward to a rare slow day.

Ha. Not in this crazy campaign.

In denying that story, the McCain team put a whole other narrative in play, what you might describe as a crossover hit between the news and tabloid cultures.

When Markos Moulitsas saw that one of the contributors to his liberal blog was accusing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin of lying about her 4-month-old baby, he was a bit skeptical.

"I feel a little weird about the questions being asked," he says. "But I also feel a little weird about saying, 'Shut up, people.' It takes a lot for me to step in and squash what's on Daily Kos."

In less than 48 hours, the allegations by a Kos diarist known as ArcXIX ricocheted into the mainstream media, when John McCain's designated running mate announced Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant and plans to have the baby and marry the father.

The McCain campaign felt compelled to release the information, say two staffers who declined to be identified discussing internal strategy, after receiving inquiries from national reporters about the Kos posting and questions from Alaska reporters about local scuttlebutt that Bristol Palin was pregnant.

Campaign officials, expressing outrage at the questions, nonetheless concluded that Bristol's condition could no longer be kept secret after some British tabloids jumped on the allegations, such as London's Daily Mail reporting that Palin was "facing a dirty tricks campaign suggesting she was really the grandmother of her youngest son."

The campaign statement served to knock down the far-fetched suggestion on the Kos site -- based partly on a perusal of photographs -- that Palin's infant son, Trig, had been secretly delivered by Bristol. But it also sparked a new round of journalistic self-examination over whether such family matters should be pursued.

"All the conversations that used to go on privately in the back of a bar -- and all the rumors that used to get passed around -- now seem to find their way onto the blogs," says Todd Harris, a Republican strategist and former McCain spokesman. "It forces campaigns to push back immediately against even the craziest of rumors because the line is getting thinner between what remains solely on partisan blogs and what makes the leap to the mainstream press."

When the National Enquirer charged that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had fathered a "love child," in tabloid parlance, most mainstream media outlets refused to carry the allegation for eight months. That changed last month when Edwards acknowledged to ABC News that he'd had an extramarital affair with a former campaign aide, Rielle Hunter, but denied that he is the father of her 5-month-old daughter.