Is it too good to last? The levee break of raw candor that Hurricane Katrina let wild in the media, I mean. In the wake of Rathergate and Newsweek's shamefaced apology for the Koran-flushed-down-the-toilet story, American journalism had assumed a fetal position, begging for forgiveness from the bloggers, ombudsmen, and op-ed pages giving it so much grief. Such a pitiful sight was this posture that Douglas McCollam, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, urged the press to climb out of its defensive crouch and stand on its hind legs again. For God's sake, stop prostrating yourself! Hurricane Katrina tragically granted his wish. In the week following Katrina's marauding of the Gulf Coast, American journalism magically awakened, arose from its glass coffin, and roused itself to impromptu glory. Locally, the New Orleans Times-Picayune—"the TimesPic"—performed valiantly, even with its flooded-out staff scattered across Louisiana. Nationally, the press echoed the Rolling Stones with A Bigger Bang and proved it had at least one gnarly blast left in it after decades of noisy frittering. Coddled since 9/11, President Bush found himself pursued across the bayou by newshounds snappin' at his rear end.

In contrast to the invasion of Iraq, the network reporters and anchors covering the chaos and misery in the foul floodwaters of Louisiana and Mississippi were unembedded—free to report what was unraveling before them without military or government muzzlers playing chaperone. For once they didn't have to behave as if they had electronic bracelets beeping their every move. To hear Fox News's Shepard Smith release an angry howl that hasn't been heard since Allen Ginsbeig went atomic, to see CNN's courtly Anderson Cooper tell Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu to wake up and smell the corpses (she got the message, later threatening to punch President Bush if the feds kept bad-mouthing local officials), to witness the sobbing breakdown of Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard as he told Tim Russert on Meet the Press about the drowning death of an emergency worker's elderly mother, who had waited four days for a rescue that never came—it was like removing the lid and releasing the pent-up truth. But it was only a matter of time before the lid was screwed back on to prevent any further outbreaks of reality, and the standouts in Hurricane Katrina coverage found themselves standing alone.

Among the standouts was Brian Williams, who vanquished whatever doubts were hanging around the lobby regarding his fitness to succeed Tom Brokaw as numero uno at NBC Nightly News, which bolstered its status as the ratings champion among evening newscasts post-Katrina. No one questioned Williams's poise, telegenic good looks, seamless delivery, dedication to the job, and deadpan self-deprecation in informal settings (a vital element if one is to be a regular banterer on Imus in the Morning— you have to be able to poke fun at yourself with enough ironic gravitas to indicate that you're also poking fun at your ability to poke fun at yourself) Williams won high marks in every category, looking and sounding like the ideal product of anchorman eugenics. That's what was iffy about him. He looked and sounded a little too impeccable for the part, his tan just this shade of George Hamilton festive orange, his mellow tones traveling a little too smoothly along the conveyer belt from mouth to microphone. Williams's devotion to NASCAR fed suspicions that he was NBC's sop to the red states and the white suburban populism that had helped give Bush two terms in office and a kickass gleam to Toby Keith's boots. However, as the sole network anchor on the original scene in New Orleans, Williams proved through marathon reporting that he was his own person, whose primary loyalty was to the story and to those suffering without food, water, or shelter in the breakdown of order and infrastructure. Not only was his on-air reporting Murrow-worthy, but his MSNBC blog scarily documented the pushback he and his colleagues received from armed and dangerous peacekeepers, one of whom pointed a gun at members of the media to keep them from doing their jobs.

Katrina had unintended consequences for CNN, and experience teaches that unintended consequences are usually bad. Not here. The emergency catalyzed CNN into becoming interesting again, something it hasn't been since co-founder Ted Turner wielded a cocky cigar in his maverick prime. Without "the Mouth from the South" charting course, CNN suffered acute personality drainage. Staggering around like an amnesia victim searching for its lost identity, CNN finally had the cobwebs tom from its eyes by Katrina and had the eureka revelation that it's a news organization, not a utility closet with Robert Novak stuck behind the brooms. In hurricanes past, CNN would dispatch ace host Anderson Cooper close to the landfall spot to latch onto a pole or tree trunk and be lashed by the tempestuous elements; he was the Saint Sebastian of wind and rain. This time the intelligence and commitment Cooper has brought to his nightly show, Anderson Cooper 360°, outshone the location stunt work. The situation here was much more dire, a far deeper infliction, and when the rains stopped, Cooper roamed and reported and didn't put up with guff from excuse-makers. His silvery attack seemed to galvanize those holding down the fort at CNN headquarters, which for too long had been a high-tech Sleepy Hollow.

No program benefited more than CNN's new production, The Situation Room. When CNN unveiled this lavish three-hour weekday razzle-dazzler on August 8 of this year, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, it threatened to be CNN president Jonathan Klein's crowning folly, perhaps his auto-da-fe. The futuristic set, the sonic bombast, the zoom-in, zoom-out visuals, the fast tempo—this was a news broadcast designed for the mutant race of the wired generation. With multiple screens evoking 24 or the nerve-center lair of Vice President Dick Cheney's undisclosed location (a battery of surveillance cams satelliting the earth, zeroing in on every hot spot), The Situation Room was laughably overwrought at first, so hyped up and panic-mode that it approached every story as if it were a possible doomsday device. Hurricane Katrina gave the show an opportunity to justify its fly-eyed delivery system. The multiple screens provided editorial commentary as overview shots of fires and distraught, displaced homeless families ' crying for relief were juxtaposed with live footage of FEMA spokesmen or White House flacks droning rote responses in other checkerboard frames. The video compositions gave lie to the bureaucratic assurances, and the assurances sounded weaker with each reiteration. Scathing as the counterpoint images were, they were no match for The Situation Room's resident cynic, Jack Cafferty, whose ire showered the mediascape with volcanic ash.

CNN FINALLY HAD THE EUREKA REVELATION THAT IT'S A NEWS ORGANIZATION, NOT A UTILITY CUTSET.

A local fixture on New York's news broadcasts, Cafferty had never quite found the proper slot in the batting order at CNN, where his unsunny disposition conflicted with the breakfast cheer of its morning show, when it was hosted by Bill Hemmer and Soledad O'Brien. After one of his crabby sarcasms, their smiles would get stuck to their teeth as they braincomputed an appropriate response. Youngsters don't quite know what to do with a laconic cuss like Cafferty, who is among the last of a noble, cranky breed—the licensed curmudgeon. Although H. L. Mencken is often considered the father of the species, it is something of a misnomer where he's concerned. Mencken was too radical in his rejection of Christianity and the average ruck of humanity, too ebullient in his love of beer and German composers, to qualify as a simple sourpuss philosopher. The typical curmudgeon is far more conventional in his pet peeves and personal irks. Sloppy dress, bad grammar, plastic packaging, and snooty French waiters are what tend to make him chafe. His rumpled face an advertisement for antacid relief, a curmudgeon is primarily a middle-aged male grump out of sorts with modern fads and trendy jargon, growling like an old dog from the porch at the idiot parade going by. (The only female curmudgeon who leaps to mind is southern pistol Florence King, who has retired from her kvetching post at National Review.) With once notable TV curmudgeons such as Henry Morgan and Cleveland Amory dead and fading from memory, Cafferty, Don Imus, and Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes are the only ones still clinging to the bark.

On The Situation Room, Cafferty found the prize soapbox that had eluded him elsewhere on CNN. Pairing him with the bionic Wolf Blitzer was inspired casting. In the Wolf Man, who never blinks, never sweats, never sleeps, and never tires, Cafferty found the perfect straight man—a total stiff. If other hosts didn't know how to react to Cafferty's barbed mutterings, this poses no problems for Blitzer, since he seldom reacts to anything, human interaction not being one of his hobbies. Clipboard surgically attached to his hands, Blitzer maintains a lack of affect whatever Cafferty's provocations, blinking at plausible intervals as Cafferty drives the argument downfield with an eloquence to match his ferocity.

Here was his eruption on Katrina, as thousands awaited evacuation from the Superdome:

I got to tell you something. We got five or six hundred letters before the show even went on the air. No one, no one says the federal government is doing a good job in handling one of the most atrocious and embarrassing and far reaching and calamitous things that has come along in this country in my lifetime. I'm 62. I don't remember—I remember the riots in Watts. I remember the earthquake in San Francisco. I remember a lot of things. 

I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to those people that are in that Superdome down there? I mean what is going— this is Thursday. This is Thursday. This storm happened five days ago. It's a disgrace. And don't think the world isn't watching. This is the government the taxpayers are paying for, and it's fallen right flat on its face, as far as I can see, in the way it's handled this thing.

Once the federal government swung into action, Cafferty questioned the stagecraft behind the rescue op. "Do you suppose, Wolf, that the arrival of the relief convoys and the political photo ops on the Gulf Coast happening at the very same time were a coincidence today?" Not having an answer programmed into his subroutines, Wolf was non-responsive save for a few stray syllables. Asked if he had any final thoughts, Cafferty gaveled, "It's embarrassing."

The anti-Cafferty of Katrina—his Bizarro World double—was Bill O'Reilly, host of Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor. Despite his chesty pride in running "a no-spin zone," O'Reilly spun like a turntable on the Bush administration's behalf. Although O'Reilly bears a passing resemblance to a curmudgeon—a middle-aged white male running low on talcum powder—a genuine curmudgeon deflates big shots with finely flicked darts. For all his braggadocio about "looking out for the little guy," O'Reilly, like Rush Limbaugh, is a big shot who enjoys the prerogatives of being a big shot and hearing himself spout. He usually contents himself with the standard targets of the right-wing rifle range: Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Barbra Streisand. Or an occasional new favorite, such as incendiary, longhair professor Ward Churchill. What wasn't standard operating procedure with Katrina was the unseemly spectacle of O'Reilly trying to piss on his own colleagues, pulling rank on fellow host Shepard Smith, whose reporting thundered with indignation over the bungling and failure he witnessed in New Orleans. Smith had on-air spats with O'Reilly and conservative Fox host Sean Hannity (who, shilling for the Bushies, suggested that Smith needed to get a little perspective on the situation, to which Shep, still in New Orleans, shot back, "That is perspective!"). Once Smith was back in the New York studio as a guest on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly chalked up his colleague's outbursts to hot flashes. "You got some emotion," O'Reilly said with an implicit sneer, the only emotion O'Reilly traffics in being righteous anger. Jeff Jarvis, writing in his BuzzMachine blog, recounts the rest of the segment:

O'Reilly can't ever help saying that he knows what's happening and no one else does: "I knew, I knew that a huge bureaucracy like the federal government couldn't move that fast." He tries to defend the feds and blame the locals; Shep won't jump to conclusions and he just gives Bill a cold stare that, I believe, will become his trademark. He cuts O'Reilly down with silence and the authority of experience: He was where O'Reilly wasn't.

POVERTY HAS BEEN SCRUBBED FROM THE AMERICAN SCREEN WITH A SANITARY WIPE.

What the Smith-O'Reilly face-off uncovered was the schism, the chasm, between those who stuck with the playbook during Katrina and those who went with their perceptions, instincts, and passions. Apart from Smith, everyone at Fox News adhered to the Republican playbook, particularly Brit Hume and Fred Barnes, who bailed out the Bush administration with more zeal than they showed for the flood victims.

Another who stuck to the playbook was Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball. He was off his game during Katrina. Or, rather; he was on his game, only it was a game no one else was playing. Matthews mentally funneled the images and info coming from the region into a fixation on finding a savior on horseback. It was embarrassing, his hero-shopping for a big strong manly man to seize the reins. A diligent blogger of high mischief, Digby of Hullabaloo (digbysblog.blogspot.com) compiled a clip reel of Matthews's breathless lobbying with guest after guest for a marquee name to seize history by the scruff. "Congressman Livingston, you love that area. u grew up there. That's your home. Do you think we should have somebody like a Rutty Giuliani or a Colin Powell, some big shot on the site who says, I will make the big decisions at federal, state and local levels right now?" "Let me ask you, Howard Safir [former New York City police commissioner], the big question. Should the president have a person of high prestige and command ability, almost like a young Douglas Mac Arthur or a younger; perhaps, Colin Powell—I don't want to knock him— he might be the right guy— who stands ready to take charge in these tragic situations?" With Bernard Kerik, the disgraced nominee for Homeland Security, who has been enjoying a reputation rehab courtesy of cable talk shows (where he's fawned over as a human boulder of street smarts), Matthews went deep in the pocket and threw long: "You know, whenever we have, Mr. Commissioner [Kerik], a big challenge, like rebuilding Tokyo after World War II or rebuilding Berlin or saving Berlin from the communists, the president of the United States, whoever he was, would name a big figure, Lucius Clay in [the] Berlin airlift, of course, the general, or, of course General MacArthur in Tokyo.

"He became basically an American Caesar over there."

Excuse me, but isn't this supposed to be a democracy or republic or at least a plausible semblance of what the Founders intended? The last thing we need or should want is an appointed Caesar swanking around in jodhpurs, brandishing his riding crop. And when are grown men in the media going to get over their gaga schoolgirl crushes on Colin Powell, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani? Especially since it's clear the latter isn't going to accept a high-profile, high-risk job and jeopardize any possible presidential run with an ill-timed scandal or mistake. (One Bernie Kerik is baggage enough.) Since 9/11, "America's Mayor" hasn't done anything except make craploads of money and pimp for mediocre Republican candidates, such as Charles Winburn for mayor of Cincinnati. Other names Matthews threw into the hopper as worthy of wearing Caesar's laurel were Jack Welch and Norman Schwarzkopf: two more male-menopause patriarchal heartthrobs.

For all his nervous crackle and Beat-poet stream-of-consciousness bebop, Matthews typifies the besetting problem of top-tier American journalism even in the flash point of Hurricane Katrina: the dead, clammy choke hold of Washington consensus, its obsession with famous retreads as the answer to social ferment. They try to nullify any clamor or unrest from the ground up by re-asserting the Wisdom of Washington. As correspondents in the field were causing a ruckus, the Beltway pundits defended their comfort zone like a castle. Where reporters and rogue elephants such as Cafferty recognized the rupture in American society revealed by the botched evacuation of New Orleans, David Broder (who actually intoned, "For a president who believes that actions speak louder than words, this is an advantageous setting"), Cokie Roberts, George Will, Mara Liasson, the editorial board of The Washington Post (which must vacation in George Bush's pants), and other enforcers and preservers of national innocence did their valiant best to chloroform everyone into bland submission. It wasn't entirely smooth and creamy in the capital. Full of feistiness, the White House press corps beat on White House spokesman Scott McClellan like the Ramones during the daily briefings. But that's McClellan's role, to be a super-absorbent sponge for abuse. (White House press briefings are the closest C-SPAN gets to pro wrestling.) The Beltway pundits are the agenda police, the articulators of permissible discourse. They may not have the popular reach of Brian Williams or Anderson Cooper, but, unwittingly or not, they help protect the powerful investment the political-corporate oligopoly has in keeping dissent down to a dull roar and division within a few polling points.

APART FROM SMITH, EVERYONE AT FOX NEWS ADHERED TO THE REPUBLICAN PLAYBOOK.

Much was made (and rightly so) of the racial rift exposed by Hurricane Katrina. Watching the watery exodus of New Orleans residents, Wolf Blitzer, meaning no ill, made the memorable observation "They are so black," but in the fever swamps of some conservative blogs and talk-radio blabfests, baiting lazy, shiftless black folks for being responsible for their own mess was a major form of recreation. One radio talk-show host, Glenn Beck, called some of the stranded "scumbags" and unburdened himself of the sentiment "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9/11 victims," but the Katrina victims beat their record. This ugly reflux was no surprise. Race is never off the table as a touchy topic in this country, whether the subject is the dearth of black N.EL. coaches or the crotchy influence of hip-hop or Michael Jackson's postmodern ambiguity. It's class, not race, that's been the great undiscussable. The true eye-opener from Katrina was having the flap lifted on the specter of lower-depths poverty in this country. All those poor people—where'd they come from? They've been kept under wraps for so long that seeing them massed or queued for food stamps and A.T.M. cards was like having a family secret escape from the cellar.

Poverty has been scrubbed from the American screen with a sanitary wipe. The New York Times can publish chastening headlines about the poverty rate rising under President Bush, but those numbers remain abstractions until faces and bodies apply flesh to them. Network news and reality shows oscillate between salivating over celebrity bling and fretting about the middle-class squeeze (climbing health-care costs, etc.), but those down in the basement of the American Dream might as well be mole people for all the attention they draw. We seldom see anyone on the thin crust of poverty in prime-time entertainment. On soaps like The O.C. or Desperate Housewives, being underprivileged means looking sheepish around the pool for having a laptop or a set of wheels a model/make behind everyone else's, or, if you're a parent, being faced with the shuddering prospect of being forced to send yow! spoiled brats to community college because the no-good ex is behind on the alimony payments. Affluent characters with trim bods enjoy glossy dilemmas ripe with sexual glow and psychological conflict. Poor people's problems are like a chronic cough or limp, no fun to dramatize. Summing up the majority attitude toward the poor in his famous review of Michael Harrington's The Other America, Dwight Macdonald said that poor people never seem able to obtain traction; things are always going wrong for them; their problems are so complicated—face it, they're a bringdown, man. Which is why America ignores them as much as possible, until it's no longer possible and the conscience is nagged.

Macdonald was writing in the 60s, Mien there were still institutional consciences in Washington that could be nagged into action, however ill-conceived. We're much slicker about our self-interests now, finding it within our hearts to forgive ourselves for letting large pockets of society rot at the curb. Katrina made that indifference less easy to maintain, but America is a big country, capable of swallowing and digesting a banquet of intractable problems and still sinking into a long nap. Especially if that nap is undisturbed by an independent press. Journalists aren't comfortable being too far out in front of a story, and for good reason. One false move, one embarrassing mistake, one expensive lawsuit, and they may be Ratherized into radioactive material. With Katrina, they saw no choice but to be out front, and they acquitted themselves heroically. It would be craven to retreat now and reverse momentum. In a USA Today article tided "Katrina Rekindles Adversarial Media," Boston University professor Bob Zelnick was quoted as offering a cautionary contrarian view about the turbocharged reportage. "I do not believe the press is guilty of the charge that it abandoned its healthy skepticism in Iraq, and I would hate to see it draw the inference from New Orleans that 'in your face' journalism is the panacea for restoring our lost credibility," he said. I say, Ignore that man at the chalkboard and his wet-blanket advice. "In your face" is preferable to being on your knees. Save the genuflection for Sunday Mass.