While the big three anchors all traveled to the Gulf to report on Hurricane Gustav, many cable anchors stayed behind in St. Paul, but devoted their shows almost entirely to Gustav, which came ashore at 9:30amCT southwest of New Orleans.
• Fox and Friends aired as normal from 5am-9am from St. Paul. While there was heavy Gustav coverage, Gretchen Carlson interviewed First Lady Laura Bush live from the Xcel Center. Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly picked up at 9amET and are continuing into the 11amET hour. Hemmer and Kelly had planned to anchor a 5pmET show from the floor of the Xcel Energy Center, but with the truncated RNC schedule, that is up in the air, at least for today.
• MSNBC preempted Morning Joe and continued Gustav coverage from New York. (TVNewser will be attending a Huffington Post panel here in Minneapolis that is being moderated by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and attended by, among others, FNC’s Laura Ingraham.) MSNBC has also announced that Keith Olbermann will not be co-anchoring MSNBC’s prime time RNC coverage from St. Paul. But the programming schedule is still not set, and dependent on what Gustav does the rest of the day. Olbermann will be back at MSNBC HQ as prime time breaking news anchor.
• CNN aired a split, but heavily Gustav-focused American Morning with John Roberts in St. Paul and Kiran Chetry in New York and their team of correspondents and anchors stationed along the Gulf Coast.