This NYT story on how CNN and NPR turned out to be the right outlets for the hurricane Katrina story.

Some excerpts:

It wasn't the false weight of the anchors that transformed the coverage during the hurricane: Larry King's fussy ties and Sean Hannity's umbrage at civil unrest both looked silly. It was left to reporters embedded in the mayhem to let Americans know that a third world country had suddenly appeared on the Gulf Coast.

In particular, CNN, the much-maligned, overrun cable news operation, and National Public Radio, the prissy, embattled bastion of the quiet left, both found their voices amidst the chaos.

Conceived by Ted Turner as a maypole for news junkies, CNN did not overtake Fox News in the ratings, but it did experience a significant advance. From a rating of 0.5 before the hurricane, by Monday CNN had a 2.0 rating, just below Fox's 2.3.

Holding down CNN's evening coverage, Aaron Brown's quizzical mix of gravitas and befuddlement finally landed on the right story. His on-camera fretting is freakish to behold in normal times, but these are not normal times. ...

In a story where the line between perpetrator and victim is sliced razor thin, tempers are bound to fray. Anderson Cooper, CNN's bright young thing who had made fun of hurricane reporting in the past, found himself in the thick of it on Thursday and lashed back in what was supposed to be an interview with Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana.

"I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi," he said. "And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated."

Mr. Cooper's well-shaded outrage - he stopped just this short of editorializing - elicited the kind of anger that has been mostly missing from a toothless press. After a couple of years on the run from the government, public skepticism and self-inflicted wounds, the press corps felt its toes touch bottom in the Gulf Coast and came up big. ...

NPR was among the first to let the public in on the nonplan for the emergency. After people who did exactly what the government told them to do found themselves without food, water, diapers, you name it, public radio reporters took their microphones into boats, onto rooftops and into the Superdome to let them say exactly what was happening to them.

Listening, it turns out, fills a big silence at the center of so much media noise. The memes of mainstream coverage - heroes and victims, right and left - did not situate well over Katrina. It is easy to tut-tut from a distance, to suggest that this was bound to happen and everyone should have gotten out of Dodge, but that does not reflect the practical issues that people without cars or money confronted.