Sarah Speaks!

Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, has agreed to a television interview, with ABC News.

The pending interview was first reported by The Associated Press and has been confirmed by the campaign of Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. An ABC executive, who also confirmed the interview, said that the network would announce it shortly. The executive also said that the date and time that it would air were still being worked out.

ABC’s Charlie Gibson is scheduled to interview Ms. Palin in Alaska sometime later this week.

The McCain camp did not say why it chose Mr. Gibson, but it had selected him last week as the only major journalist to interview Mr. McCain himself during the Republican convention in St. Paul.

After his interview with Mr. McCain had aired, Mr. Gibson posted on his blog that he had “fretted” about how to approach the many personal issues that had come up about Ms. Palin and decided to ignore them.

“The major development in his campaign obviously is his surprise choice of Sarah Palin,” Mr. Gibson wrote. “It took some time in thinking about it, but I finally decided not to even bring up the issues with her family, for they are issues of family and should remain so. Once you know about her daughter’s pregnancy, once you know about her husband’s political interest in the Alaskan Independence Party, once you know about special nature of their latest child, I think that’s enough.

“The relevant questions about Governor Palin, the questions that go to her suitability to serve as vice president, all relate to her experience, or lack thereof, and her policy positions as a mayor and governor in Alaska. Once I decided to restrict the Palin questions to those areas, the interview kind of formed itself,” Mr. Gibson wrote.

Pressure has been mounting from news organizations for interviews with the vice presidential nominee since Mr. McCain announced that he had picked her as his running mate on Aug. 29.

But the McCain campaign has been keeping her away from reporters.

Mr. McCain, who appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” today, said he expected Ms. Palin would start doing interviews “in the next few days.”

His campaign manager, Rick Davis, who spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” said the campaign would make her available on its own schedule.

“She’s not scared to answer questions,” Mr. Davis said. “But you know what? We run our campaign, not the news media. And we’ll do things on our timetable.”

He added: “Why would we want to throw Sarah Palin into a cycle of piranhas called the news media that have nothing better to ask questions about than her personal life and her children?

So until at which point in time we feel like the news media is going to treat her with some level of respect and deference, I think it would be foolhardy to put her out into that kind of environment.”