I bet there were some periods of contraflow that conveniently were not filmed. I noticed a pattern in last week's video. As soon as a rescue effort was operational, the agony channels switched focus to a new threat or failure. For example, when the helicopters and buses were clearing out NO, instead of a few reports on the scope of the rescue, show producers started hyping up the threat lurking in the floodwaters.
For another example, the VA hospitals were successfully evacuated. Did we ever hear about that on TV?
The real story is that the mainstream media frequently and predictably "riots."In fact, Katrina and its "media riot" is a replay of Andrew and its aftermath. In Andrew as in Katrina, a Democratic governor (Lawton Chiles) withheld a call for federal disaster aid, restricting a Republican President Bush (41 instead of 43) in his ability to act decisively. And after Andrew as after Katrina, the media "rioted" against the president.
This (barf alert) thread makes that quite clear. The difference between Katrina and Andrew, on the one hand, and the hurricanes with which FEMA was faced during the Clinton years, is that Andrew was more damaging than all those faced by Clinton's FEMA taken together - and the damage from Katrina is vastly more than that caused by Andrew.
The media riot after Katrina is simply a reportercrat war on perspective.