Last night MSNBC went to tape at 10 pm and FOX and CNN stayed live with coverage. Tonight MSNBC is live with coverage at 11 pm and FOX and CNN are running tape…

Tonight Anderson Cooper grilled former FEMA Director James Lee Witt. WHAC has the transcript…

The LA Times’ Matea Gold uses the Katrina disaster as a backstory to cover the challenges that face the future of TV News. It’s a total must read if for no other reason than Gold scoops with a timeline for Neal Shapiro’s resignation from NBC News…

NEW YORK — As television network news divisions went into overdrive last week to cover the unrelenting aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, scrambling to provide daily necessities to their crews on the ground and assemble special reports that lifted news ratings at all three networks, behind-the-scenes broadcasters were contending with another challenging reality: Their news operations face potentially drastic changes this fall, and no one is sure of the direction things will take.

It’s a time of soul-searching and open questions about the future at all three networks — even top-ranked NBC, where News president Neal Shapiro, who began negotiating his departure last spring, is expected to step down from his post as early as this week, according to several network sources familiar with the situation

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The LA Times’ Robert Lloyd in tomorrow’s paper…

On television, the Hurricane Katrina Story has played out in several phases. It constituted a weeklong true-life miniseries that completely took over several channels — on CNN, Fox, CNBC and MSNBC, it was almost the only news there was — and made itself heavily felt elsewhere, dominating network news to the near-exclusion of the rest of the world.

Ultimately the story was less about the disaster itself — the wind, the water and later the fire — than the failure to deal with it quickly, to protect the many citizens who found themselves marooned, bereft of food, water, medicine, protection or guidance. It was universally observed among newspeople that such a thing happening in the United States was incredible — Third World was the operative term — which suggests that they had not been paying much attention to the lot of the domestic poor. Many reporters questioned whether the lack of preparedness and poor follow-through had anything to do with the diversion of men, materiel and money to Iraq, but none I heard mentioned the American mania for tax cuts.

Details are still sketchy on this but a Coast Guard rescue helicopter has crashed. NBC is reporting that the two pilots walked away but Joe Scarborough is hedging on MSNBC. Who got this story first?

UPDATE: Scarborough is saying that it was a civilian helicopter.

Johnny Dollar has the video of the rescue of Floritta Greve, whose phone in to FOX News earlier in the day ICN noted here.

Said Greve, “You all are wonderful, all of you”…

Ken Parish Perkins of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram looked at the race issue yesterday though he seems to be singling out one network in particular while ignoring others…

So somebody finally spit it out.

After days of carnage and confusion and death, after countless TV images, after news conferences and press briefings and drive-bys by politicos.

After a mayor goes off, a governor seethes and a president finally gets a land’s-eye view and takes two sobbing black women into his arms, TV news broadcasts began to address the 800-pound gorilla resting in the corner:

There’s a race and class problem here.

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The Los Angeles Daily News’ David Kronke…

While watching hours upon hours of TV coverage of the tragedy left in Hurricane Katrina’s wake, it was nearly impossible not to feel despair for those stranded anywhere in the Gulf Coast, where food, water, supplies and transportation to safe areas were distressingly slow in coming.

Unless, apparently, you were CNN’s Larry King.

Kicking his program to Aaron Brown on Wednesday night, King said, “It don’t get any better.”

Brown, correcting both King’s enthusiasm and grammar, responded, “Or, it doesn’t get any worse.” But worse it got as the week wore on, particularly in New Orleans, where chaos disintegrated into anarchy. At night, when it got too dangerous for reporters to venture into the streets, interviews with correspondents in New Orleans could frequently only be conducted by phone, a chilling reminder of just how disconnected from the rest of the country the city truly was.

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ICN interrupts hurricane blogging for a an article I stumbled upon this evening. The Chicago Tribune has the LA Times’ Matea Gold writing about CNBC’s Mad Money host Jim Cramer which includes an interview with the Mad One…

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J. — Stumble across Jim Cramer’s show on CNBC and you may think you’ve come upon a music video featuring a balding, manic businessman. Lights pulsate as cameras sweep the set, lightning crackling on a flat-panel screen while booms of thunder punctuate a loud electronic guitar riff. Then a middle-aged man in rolled-up shirt sleeves flings his chair across the room, gesticulating wildly as he shouts, “Are you reaaddyyy SKIDADDYYY?!?” This is not your father’s finance show.

It’s “Mad Money With Jim Cramer,” the former hedge fund manager’s high-octane hourlong take on the world of stocks. For CNBC, it’s a far cry from sedate business fare like Louis Rukeyser’s “Wall Street Week,” which used to define the genre.

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News is breaking from the AP that eight people were shot carrying weapons on a bridge in New Orleans killing five or six ot them. I was on FOX when they announced it, flipped over to MSNBC and they were reporting it already, flipped over to CNN and they were in commercial break.

UPDATE: Johnny Dollar notes a rare win for MSNBC in breaking a story. FOX announced it 2nd, and CNN third….

On Late Edition, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Senate Judiciary Committee member Senator Orrin Hatch on the Roberts hearings. Partial transcript follows…

On whether the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts should go forward

HATCH: But you bet those hearings ought to go forward. I think Bill Rehnquist would be the first to say he wants them to go forward. He wants the court to be able to be as well-constituted as it can be on the first Monday of October. So I would think he’d be the first to say, “Go ahead, get this done.” And I think we ought to do that in his memory…

BLITZER: Have you spoken with Senator Specter about it, the chairman?

HATCH: No, I haven’t, so I don’t speak with any authority. I’m just saying that it would be up to Senator Frist and Senator Specter. But my personal belief is that Justice Rehnquist would have wanted us to go forward, because he loved and revered the court.
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FOX News’ Molly Henneberg…

“I’m here outside the River Center Shelter, the largest shelter here in Baton Rouge, about five to six thousand people are inside. It is Sunday, and for many of these people it is church day, and the shelter here is trying to allow them to maintain some type of normalcy and routine. So to that end, some local Baton Rouge churches drove vans here this morning to pick up people and take them to local churches. Also, a minister here just came and set up a little church service outside, outside the shelter across the street, and he conducted a service and people brought out their Bibles and notebooks and they just were singing and praying and getting a little encouragement there at that church service.

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Powerful television on FOX a short time ago. Floritta Greve, a 71 year old woman living in New Orleans just called in to FOX News and spoke with Bob Sellers. The woman didn’t try to evacuate because she couldn’t carry her dog through the water. Sellers had the woman give out her address over the TV.

UPDATE: FOX brought Greve back on the air about half an hour later. It sounds like there was some confusion over the spelling and pronounciation of the address she lives at…

Transcript of first interview follows…

SELLERS: As the cleanup continues in New Orleans, we’re joined now on the phone now by Floritta Grieve who is one of the folks trapped in their homes in the New Orleans area. Floritta, are you with us?

GREVE: Yes, I am.

SELLERS: Tell me where you are.
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Salon’s Farhad Manjoo takes a look at the coverage as he sees it… (sub req.)

I think Manjoo’s bias is showing. Big time…

“After the storm, a storm — and I mean a storm! — of aid!” Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto began his broadcast on Friday afternoon, as the screen flashed with images of National Guard convoys motoring in to the broken city of New Orleans, and troops doling out food and water to victims of Hurricane Katrina. To watch a few hours of Fox on Friday was to experience reassurance, some relief that things were getting better on the Gulf Coast. While the situation may have been bleak this week, Fox’s anchors and reporters acknowledged, and while there still were some pockets where “law and order” — a Fox obsession — had not been restored, help was on the way. Or as Cavuto put it, police were “attempting to take back the city of New Orleans … as the resident of the United States takes in the damage and pours out the relief.”

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CNN’s correspondents blog…

Ted Rowlands:

There is not much left of St. Mark’s church. About 100 church members joined the bishop of Mississippi for about an hour long service here. There were a lot of tears and even the reverend broke down at one point talking about the church that had been lost.

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CNN’s Tom Foreman turned in a report this morning that “fact checked” statements by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown. Transcript follows…
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On Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Blitzer was interviewing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. partial transcript follows…
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FOX News’ Adam Housley just turned in a powerful report on those who still haven’t left their flooded homes. Housley was travelling with a search crew on a boat as they navigated New Orleans’ flooded waters. At one point a rescue worker is pleading with a family to get their baby out of the area. Said the rescue worker…

It’s unbelievable. I cannot understand that these people have been back here for a week. They’re starving, they have no water, they’ve got young children, they’ve got unsanitary conditions…they need to be taken out of here and they just don’t understand…they don’t understand that this water is not going anywhere anytime soon…that there are people willing to help them get them out…get them to shelters…and it’s just amazing…unbelievable…that they do not want to leave.

Tim Goodwin in the San Francisco Chronicle…

As 24-hour cable channels documented the fall of New Orleans from a major American city to what looked like, from helicopters and roaming cameras, a Third World country, all viewers out of the area could do was stare in near disbelief.

The slow dissolve into chaos became television’s most depressing soap opera. From Monday’s reporters-in-the-rain faux machismo to the dawn of the disaster on Tuesday and Wednesday, it was a televised transformation like none other. What could become this country’s biggest natural disaster unfurled in slower and slower increments on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and elsewhere. Monday’s rote coverage of Katrina became Tuesday’s stunning flood scenes and Wednesday’s widespread panic, looting and disorder.