A perfect example of how the establishment media manufactures the news:

If Michelle Kosinski’s canoe had sprung a leak on NBC’s “Today” show Friday, she didn’t have much to worry about.

In one of television’s inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera - making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep.

Sure, this might be a little amusing, but it was less so during the Hurricane Katrina hype, much of which turned out to be phony as well. Not only is it likely that some New Orleans residents failed to evacuate due to the over-hyping of previous storms—notice how every winter blizzard in the Northeast is dramatically dubbed “The Storm of the Century”?—but the false reports of mass rapes, roving armed gangs, and snipers shooting at helicopters kept frightened relief workers out of the city.

How many people died by staying in New Orleans because earlier hurricane hype led them to disregard the pre-landfall Katrina reporting? How many people died because over-the-top reporting in the days following Katrina hindered the relief effort?

The media dedicated much of its post-Katrina reporting to hand-wringing over governmental failures in the response to the crisis, but they should also look at themselves and examine how much of that crisis they caused.