By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 2, 2008; 5:40 AM

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.

This time, Palin emerged as McCain's vice-presidential pick Friday, the pregnancy tale hit the Internet on Saturday, was trumpeted by the Drudge Report on Sunday and reached mainstream outlets just after noon Monday. Edwards had a former mistress in seclusion who insisted someone else was the father; the soon-to-be-obvious Palin story was within her own family.

Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein press center at Harvard University, says that, as in the Edwards case, the Palin pregnancy story "was untouched until the person involved made a statement. That legitimized it for the traditional media."

It is hardly unusual for a teenage girl to become pregnant, and unless she is Jamie Lynn Spears, who sold her baby pictures to OK! magazine, the news value is minimal. But some media commentators say Palin is fair game, not just because she is running for national office but because she is a self-described "hockey mom" who told the nation that her eldest son is headed to Iraq.

"Once she's brought her children in as selling points, unfortunately the bad comes in with the good," says Lisa Bloom, a Court TV anchor. "She's integrating her mom quality as a key part of her résumé. We didn't do that in the press; she did that."

Some conservative bloggers were dismissive of the way the rumors spread. On Townhall.com, Amanda Carpenter wrote that the Daily Kos contributor was "disgustingly inspecting Bristol's midriff with all the fervor of L.A. paparazzi examining J-Lo's or Jennifer Aniston's washboard stomachs for evidence of a 'bump.' "

Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who writes the conservative blog Instapundit, refused to link to the Kos posting. "I certainly wouldn't have gone with this," Reynolds says. "It just seemed so ridiculous. I don't see how this story adds up to a vindication of the Kos diarist."

But blogger Andrew Sullivan, a right-leaning former New Republic editor who supports Barack Obama, pushed the story about the baby, who was born with Down syndrome. Citing unresolved questions and the campaign's refusal to release the medical records involved, he writes: "The circumstantial evidence for weirdness around this pregnancy is so great that legitimate questions arise -- questions anyone with common sense would ask. . . . After all, this baby was a centerpiece of the public case for Palin made by the Republicans."

Karl Rove, the former Bush White House adviser, says the McCain camp had planned to publicize Bristol Palin's pregnancy all along. "They have to. . . By election day she'll be seven months pregnant," Rove says. With Hurricane Gustav dominating the news, he adds, Monday "was a reasonably good day to do it."

The controversy erupted as a debate was taking shape over whether some media criticism of Palin's limited government experience has been sexist. Liberal radio host Ed Schultz was telling listeners Monday that Palin was an "empty pantsuit" who had set off a "bimbo alert." Shortly afterward, the pregnancy statement was released and, without missing a beat, Schultz said her daughter's situation was relevant because the governor is a champion of moral values.

But a liberal reader posting on Salon under the name Redstocking Grandma denounced the pregnancy allegations: "This is just creepy; it feels stalkerish." What some Democratic supporters were doing, she said, is "revolting."

While the Web can serve as an incubator for unsubstantiated charges, it also tends to be self-correcting. Another Daily Kos contributor late Sunday unearthed a photo

from earlier this year in which the governor looks quite pregnant.

Moulitsas says he doesn't know who the anonymous ArcXIX is -- his contributors decide whether to identify themselves -- but that his site also disclosed that Palin was once a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, which has pushed for a vote on seceding from the United States. That was confirmed Monday by ABC News.

"Our people are doing the vetting. Even if some of it is hitting dead ends, other ones are striking direct hits," Moulitsas says. His role, he adds, "is to sit back and let the citizen journalists do their job, and I amplify the stuff that shakes out."

LAT: "Now the magnitude of McCain's gamble is becoming clear.

"For every piece of the portrait of Palin that the McCain campaign sketches, a far more complicated picture of the Alaska governor is drawn.The youthful mother of five whose placement on the ticket was meant to reinforce traditional values has now revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter is pregnant -- a piece of information that the family and the campaign said they had hoped to keep private."

NYT: "A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain's choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket . . .

"Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin's background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice."

A tad late, perhaps?

The daughter's pregnancy, and the hockey-playing father, were

apparently an open secret in Alaska.

The left may not be rushing to embrace this, if this HuffPost blog by Ruth Hochberger is any indication:

"When a 17-year-old girl gets herself pregnant, I believe the press ought to stand down unless there's an unusually good justification for publishing.

"How old is the family member? 17. Would any parent out there want to be judged as fit or unfit for their job on the basis of the nutty or irresponsible stuff our kids do?"

The debate about a future President Palin continues, and David Frum, one of those who led the conservative revolt against Harriet Miers, is none too pleased:

"McCain's supporters argue that he is more serious about national security than Barack Obama. But the selection of Sarah Palin invites the question: How serious can he be if he would place such a neophyte second in line to the presidency? Barack Obama at least balanced his inexperience with Mr. Biden's experience. What is Mr. McCain doing? . . . So this is the future of the Republican party you are looking at: a future in which national security has bumped down the list of priorities behind abortion politics, gender politics, and energy politics."

National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez makes the case in the opposite direction:

"Contrary to popular pundit belief, Sarah Palin is no Harriet Miers. And it's a funny thing: When conservatives like myself opposed Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court on the grounds that she was under-qualified and an affirmative-action pick, we were slammed as being sexist and elitist. Does that mean the Left and others railing against Palin are sexist and anti-Eskimo (her husband is part Eskimo)? Of course not. That would be silly -- as it was in the case of the Miers debate. Instead, lefty columnists and pundits should admit they don't like her because she's a conservative, not because they're concerned about a rot in the conservative movement . . .

"Was she picked because she's a woman? Of course it played a role. Does that annoy me? Yes, especially if she doesn't drop the glass-ceiling talk. Was it smart politics though? Maybe."

Or maybe not, if Hillary voters turn up their noses.

Conservative stalwart Heather MacDonald, in City Journal, isn't buying:

"Thanks a lot, John McCain. With his selection of an unknown, two-year female governor as his running mate, he has just ensured that the diversity racket will be an essential component of presidential politics forever more. Had the 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose greatest political accomplishment before being elected Alaska's governor in 2006 was serving as mayor of Wasilla (population 9,780), been named Stanley, she would have had exactly zero chance of ending up in the Oval Office in the next four years. But from now on, any presidential ticket that consists solely of white males--no matter their qualifications--will likely be dead in the water."

In Slate, Michael Kinsley calls questions about experience "so five minutes ago, before Sarah Palin. Already, conservative pundits are coming up with creative explanations for McCain's choice of a vice-presidential running mate with essentially no foreign-policy experience. First prize so far goes to Michael Barone, who notes on the U.S. News & World Report blog that 'Alaska is the only state with a border with Russia. And it is the only state with territory, in the Aleutian Islands, occupied by the enemy in World War II.' I think we need to know what Sarah Palin has done, in her year and change as governor of Alaska, to protect the freedom of the Aleutian Islands before deciding how many foreign-policy-experience credits she deserves on their account.

"The official response to the question of experience emerged within hours and is only slightly more plausible: She may not have foreign policy experience, but--unlike Obama, Joe Biden, or even John McCain--she has had executive experience. Why, before her stint as governor of Alaska, population 670,000, she was mayor of a town of 9,000. Remember when the Republicans mocked Bill Clinton for being governor of a 'small state'? That would be Arkansas, population 2.8 million. As it happens, 670,000 is the population of metropolitan Little Rock . . .

"How could anyone truly believe that Barack Obama's background and job history are inadequate experience for a president and simultaneously believe that Sarah Palin's background and job history are perfectly adequate? It's possible to believe one or the other. But both? Simply not possible. John McCain has been--what's the word?--lying. And so have all the pundits who rushed to defend McCain's choice."

The governor of Alaska laughs as two radio jocks call one of her political opponents a bitch and a cancer, then invites them to her State of the State address.