Ask HN: Featured Image from a feed

On my WordPress blog, I have a syndicator plugin, with 3 or 4 websites it pulls feeds from.The problem was that it would pull the story and create the post and tags and all that - but the image would not automatically drop into the Featured Image (lower right column in the Post screen). So the home page would have blank boxes with titles, and the full post view would have images. I end up shifting it to draft mode and the stories have to be manually tweaked and posted. I think, a quick tweak to the theme design should allow the first image (usually the only one) that get's pulled in from syndication to be inserted automatically as the Featured Image as well. The problem with this is I've tried multiple times, but nothing seems to work.