"we were assured that stagnant water would submerge the 
    city for months, even as our screens showed dry, lighted 
    streets, torrents pumped back out and pools evaporating 
    under scorching heat."

    For all the media's efforts to turn the natural disaster 
    of New Orleans into a racist nightmare, a death knell for 
    one or the other political parties or an indictment of 
    American culture at large, it was none of that at all. 
    What we did endure instead were slick but poorly educated 
    journalists, worried not about truth but about pre-empting
    their rivals with an ever-more-hysterical story, all in a 
    fuzzy context of political correctness about race, the 
    environment and the war.

    Let ghoulish CNN file suit against the government to film 
    all the bloated corpses it can find. Let a pontificating 
    PBS "News-Hour" conduct more televised roundtables with 
    grim-faced elites searching out purported national racism.
    But few any longer trust a frenzied media whose reporters 
    and commentators continually prove as incompetent as they 
    are disingenuous.

    Was it too much to ask reporters to look to history to 
    judge this recovery against other past disasters here and 
    abroad? Could they have strived for accuracy instead of 
    ratings - and at least made sure that the images from 
    their cameras did not refute their own predetermined 
    scripts?