Republican Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin will finally talk to the press — or one news organization, at least — after all:
Under pressure for being shielded for questioning, Sarah Palin has agreed to sit down with Charles Gibson of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” according to an ABC News official.
No other interviews are scheduled. It will be the first TV interview for Palin since she was named 10 days ago as running mate to John McCain.
Palin had planned to return to Alaska this weekend but is so popular on the stump that she is going to stay out a few more days before returning home. One of her sons deploys to Iraq on Thursday.
Palin plans to sit down with Gibson later this week in Alaska, the source said.
The McCain campaign kept her off Sunday shows this weekend and plans to be sparing with high-risk network encounters, which they contend are unimportant to voters despite the media’s fixation on them.
But McCain officials could see her reticence was feeding the narrative of her being unprepared for the job.
The pressure will be on in three areas now:
1. Palin: She’ll have to be ready for any question thrown at her. It will be a widely-watched interview that could further boost her political stock and her ticket’s message.
2. ABC: The network came under withering criticism — including from many scholarly media types — for its questioning of Democrat Barack Obama during a Democratic debate. It was accused of going after Obama more than anyone else, basically following Clinton campaign talking points and focusing on personality versus solid issues. If the questions given to Palin are softball questions or ones that would be too easily expected to be asked, ABC News will likely be accused by Democrats of essentially doing p.r. for the McCain campaign. And if they’re too hard on her or ask something that is a big surprise and creates an awkward moment from her, Republicans will say it’s typical of the liberal news media.
3. The McCain campaign: It will have to prep her but at this point a lot of the questions, including the negative ones, can be easily anticipated.
The prediction here: It’ll get huge ratings, she’ll do just fine and the McCain campaign will either decide she can have more opportunities to talk to the press (expect a Fox News interview within weeks) or continuing to limit her interaction with the press, arguing that she has shown she can do that but is too busy with her campaign schedule. Unless there’s a big surprise, look for Palin’s popularity to go up after the interview. One reason: she’ll get many more viewers from that kind of interview than if she had gone on a Sunday morning network news interview show.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.