Flannery O'Connor helps to explain Katrina and the MSM. O'Connor believed that in order to make her readers feel something and see the world as she saw it, which, she believed, was the way the world truly was, that she needed to smash readers over the head with an anvil. During her time, she was writing about faith, racism, poverty, crime, etc.
Similarly, these days, today, "little" problems like Plame, like No Child Left Behind, like Clear Skies, like Roberts, like lying every_ single_ day... well, these stop seeming repugnant to many, many Americans, in part, because we're so used to seeing similar things.
O'Connor said she was "forced to take ever more violent means to get [her] vision across to this hostile audience." This is why we need our Reid and Pelosi and Dean to keep making noise about Bush failing New Orleans, about Bush killing those people because he's "olivious, in denial, dangerous." They need to be pithy, to be exact. Of course, we can help, by writing letters to the editor that use the same words.
Katrina is shifting the media against Bush. It's grotesque. It can't be ignored. It's peeling back eyelids and showing us the truth: Bush is grotesque.