The breaking news about DeLay took my eye off the media exaggerations during the Katrina coverage, but it didn’t distract Hugh Hewitt from the story. He’s been pursuing it aggressively, first following up on my post about Heath Allen (the reporter who said, “Those people at that point needed help no matter what was true”) by interviewing Allen on his radio show, and then cataloguing the media’s hysterics with a piece in that other magazine.

Here’s the key question from the interview with Allen:

We had all the resources of the American media combined in New Orleans. Everything they had, they threw at it. With the help of locals like you and national networks, print, media, radio, everything, not one outlet could get inside the convention center or the Superdome to do accurate reporting. What’s that tell us about the trustworthiness of American media, when it’s far away from home in a war zone like Iraq? Isn’t that in fact an obvious admission that not only can they not do the job in New Orleans, we can’t expect them to do the job of accurate reporting in a war zone like Iraq?

Hewitt was also on NewsHour last night, where he repeated the question. It’s one I’d like to see Michael Ware try to answer.