Theresa Schiavo’s last breath caused barely a pause in the national conversation over life and death that has preoccupied television news networks for the past few weeks.

CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC covered the story without interruption yesterday from the time Schiavo’s death became known shortly before 10 a.m. EST until mid-afternoon, when their gaze shifted upon news that Pope John Paul II’s condition had worsened.

“While the battle is over, the debate – for better or worse – rages,” Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith said.

ABC, CBS, and NBC provided brief special reports before 10 a.m. on the death of the brain-damaged woman in a Florida hospice, but otherwise chose to deal with the story during their regular newscasts. For West Coast viewers, news of the death came just before the start of the network morning news programs. On slow news days, the networks repeat the same broadcast that had been seen on the East Coast three hours earlier, but each scrambled yesterday to remake their shows on the fly.

Matt Lauer and Ann Curry, for instance, moved directly from the network special report into a new “Today” opening for the West Coast, Tom Touchet, the program’s executive director, said.

For the cable news networks, there was no shortage of people willing to talk about the case. By 10:07 a.m., Reverend Jesse Jackson was on the phone to CNN. Fox News Channel delivered an interview with entertainer Pat Boone.

Fox even managed to air what seemed, at first glance, to be a car chase. Instead, it was a helicopter’s-eye view of a white van transporting what the network said was Schiavo’s remains.

The bitter feud between Schiavo’s husband and her family that brought this case to public consciousness played out on television again in the hours after her death. Representatives for Schiavo’s parents, who fought to keep their daughter on a feeding tube, said they were kept away from her bedside at the precise moment that she died.