Our household has been glued to CNN for the last few days (with brief breaks from time to time when Georgia demands a Play with me Sesame or a Muppet Show), and we've been really impressed with the way that everyone from reporters in the field, to segment producers, to their studio anchors are really keeping the pressure on down along the Gulf Coast, especially in NOLA (this is the best example I could find after a cursory search of their site, but seeing Anderson Cooper lay into the Louisiana senator was the first indication that we were undergoing a serious, if perhaps temporary, sea change). I checked out the websites of a few of the other news outlets this morning, and was amazed to see that even Fox News appears, for a brief moment, actually to be fair and balanced in their coverage.

In the days following 9-11, one of the things that struck me most was the fact that, for a brief moment, the vast majority of news coverage in the US, both on networks and on cable, was about things that actually mattered. Of course, it didn't last. And there's no reason to believe that the current transformation of cable news into actually journalism is likely to be anything but a temporary condition. But I still hold out hope.