Ken Foster over at Salon.com writes:
“We’re all Oprah fodder in New Orleans
Two years after Katrina, even the most unassuming residents have grown cynical about the media spotlight. So why do we keep telling our stories?”
Aug. 29, 2007 | NEW ORLEANS — Driving through the Bywater section of New Orleans a few days ago, a friend waved me down. “How do you know that it is the second anniversary of Katrina?” she asked, and I waited for the punch line. “All of your friends just completed their third television interview of the day.”
The funniest thing about the joke was that it wasn’t much of a stretch from the truth. The media has become a fixture in the post-Katrina landscape of our city, just like vacant neighborhoods and the search-and-rescue graffiti tags beneath the new paint on every door. And after two years of living as if we were contestants on a long-running reality show, even the most unpretentious New Orleanians have grown media savvy.
Those of us who were near a television two years ago as the city flooded, then drained and flooded again, witnessed two horrors: the destruction of our city and the misguided reinterpretation of our home by reporters tasked with deciphering the remains of a civilization that had, at least for the moment, disappeared. Like novice archaeologists, they mispronounced streets and invented neighborhoods with names that had never existed before the storm. The city’s population was divided into a few easily identifiable types: the wealthy protecting their wine cellars, the eccentrics drinking at bars, the poor who couldn’t escape.
Shortly after returning to New Orleans in October 2005, I agreed to meet with a journalist who was a friend of a friend. She had been in town a few days when we sat in a cafe with a map and she attempted to make sense of east and west, north and south, levee locations and storm surges. Finally, I agreed to drive her around. “Was this a white neighborhood or a black neighborhood?” she asked at each corner we crossed. Or, “Was this rich or poor?” After the storm, it was all a mess, but she seemed confused when I insisted that even before the flood the distinctions weren’t so clear. I drove her through my own “Upper Ninth” neighborhood; then, in the Lower Ninth, where the destruction was notoriously bad, she asked, “How far is your house from the breach?” “About a mile,” I said. “I don’t think so,” she insisted, and I wondered what it was she had trouble believing.”
Posted by Lisa Marie 
Posted by Lisa Marie 