"MR. McCLELLAN: A lot of the media reports that were coming out Monday, Monday night, Tuesday morning were expressing that it had missed the massive flooding that some had projected in a worst-case scenario."

Did you watch the news early Tues? I did. All major networks [Fox, MSNBC, CNN, CBS] seemed to be implying that this was non story- just another hurricane and not the BIG STORY they had been told it might be. That New Orleans had dodged the bullet.
Now, they weren't anywhere near as glum as when Kerry lost the elections, but were sort of like "we are all dressed up, but there is no party" [or probably more accurate no one *important* has shown up at this party].
I was willing to stay up all nite and watch the news, but by around 5 am Pacific time on Tuesday, the news was well into "beat the dead horse routine" [as if they really wanted to get off this story to something more important, but they knew they would be "forced" to do story for another day or so].
Maybe, if I had stayed up a bit longer, their reporter standing in the wind in Biloxi would have encountered the very strong winds they wanted to film. I don't know. But if I had lived in New Orleans and had watched the news as I did, I would have assumed [based on the impression I got from the news reporting] that I could have returned to New Orleans. And if left soon enough maybe I could beat the heavy traffic returning to the city.

But as in all storms, it isn't about the wind, as much as it's about the water. No news reporter on Monday-Tuesday was covering the dykes- talked about, yes, but have someone actually there reporting on it, no. No one mentioned the fact that it was high tide at the time the storm hit- very critical factor. The news simply was not informative, it was the usual entertainment news of having a couple guys stand in the wind attempting to talk over the howling winds. After this, the news shifts to the "blame game", typical, standard news. It's entertainment rather than the harder work of getting information- reporting the news. It's just like the news covering the "horse race" instead of covering the political issues. Why do they do this? Because they are in the entertainment business, mostly & pretending they are doing serious news.

Now, why is it vaguely important the number of times "blame game" is mentioned. If republican were all saying this is being portrayed as "horse race" is this also important the number times "horse race" is mentioned? It's a game and it's about blame, what else are you going to call it?
Who is to blame could be a story, once there was enough information to actually make this kind of judgement possible. But the News people are vastly more advance people than normal folk, instead finding out mere information, they make the facts, they spin reality. They poke someone in the eye, and are "amazed" that person gets pissed off. They provoke blame by being in frenzy about who is to blame then may act surprised that anyone is blaming anyone.
What the reporter really wants is for McClellan or anyone else, is to play along with their game. The game played by dropping very, very sly suggestions of who is "it", then the press teases this out. It's fun. It's a game. It's not important, except to people who like to imagine they are some kind of genius. If the news wanted to follow the facts, they might get the story behind exactly why hundreds of buses were left unused and were left so they ended up in 4 feet of water. Or another critical factor, probably the most important factor, what were the steps taken 2 or more days BEFORE the storm hit New Orleans. For example, was there the real and valid concern of not wanting to alarm the public, if the storm actually didn't end up hitting New Orleans. This is always going to be a problem, but one of the purposes of planning would be to deal with this exact problem. So why didn't the planning "work"? Was there false alarms in the past that caused problems. Etc.
Also obviously large amounts of the planning did work- a high percentage of people did leave the city. But maybe there was flaws in this whole idea, unless you can get out 99.9% of population, maybe a better plan would have been to focus on areas below sea level. Get 100% of people out of there and have security forces around these areas to protect the property from looting. It probably isn't worth the lives you risk in regards to the security forces [perhaps], but at least all emergency personnel wouldn't need to be focused on trying to save these people living in the low areas in the aftermath of storm [we can assume the security forces are capable of managing on not becoming victims by taking neccessary precautions]