The Anchoress has a good comparison of the media coverage of Katrina and the Kentucky ice storm, which I posted about yesterday:

We’ve heard that “Bush ate cake”, while people suffered. (Obama ate steak and watched the Super Bowl). Bush did not quickly enough go to the disaster area to survey it and hug people and cry. (Obama – like the derided Bush – is wisely staying away so as not to impede relief efforts, but he remains un-derided). Bush dared to praise FEMA, even though FEMA was late because flood conditions and Gov. Blanco prevented them from doing much at first. Obama…hasn’t said much of anything. But he DID call the Gov. of Kentucky last Wednesday, and that Governor, Democrat Steve Beshear, apparently found the phone call heartening enough to continue.

And that’s basically all the press has had to say about President Obama. He “called the Governor on Wednesday.”

Jon Sanders pointed out in the comments to my post yesterday that the way the media is handling this natural disaster is the way they should handle them, and he’s correct. But the media’s outrageous behavior during Katrina simply can’t be given a pass. The misreporting of that event was a turning point in Bush’s popularity and it fueled the next several years of Bush Derangement Syndrome and hurt his ability to prosecute a war.