Celebs or saviors?

ON Thursday, by the time President Bush went on national TV to explain how the dispossessed could get their hands on $2,000 in FEMA funds, Oprah Winfrey and her star-studded Team Angel had already come through the Gulf Coast. On “Oprah” Wednesday, Julia Roberts was seen providing aid and comfort to evacuees in an Alabama Red Cross shelter. Matthew McConaughey helicoptered into a New Orleans hospital and helped a beleaguered doctor rescue dogs and cats.

Celebrities, in the end, beat the White House to the hearts-and-minds punch in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Strangely, they seemed on the whole more effective in offering a calming, reassuring presence and conveying a response suited to the crisis, while articulating the rage people were feeling over the government’s stumbling steps after the disaster. Where in the first stages of the Iraq war the White House owned the airwaves, producing such TV stars as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, after Katrina the Bush administration seemed desperately in need of an empathy czar to put in front of the cameras.

As celebrities began to function as reporters, with Sean Penn giving accounts of his rescue mission on the flooded streets of New Orleans, reporters had already become celebrities. Fox News’ Shepard Smith, after powerful eyewitness accounts of the hurricane aftermath last weekend, returned to New York to appear on “The Late Show With David Letterman.” Letterman gave him two full segments, the kind normally reserved for a Tom Cruise.

This isn’t usually an encouraging development, the cross-pollination of entertainment, celebrity and the business of reporting the news. But in the aftermath of Katrina it’s seemed like an oddly and perhaps scarily functional system, as the characters who emerged from the world of politics seemed woefully behind the response curve. With the exception of the New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, whose anger humanized the tragedy and served as a kind of call to arms, there wasn’t a Giuliani or Clinton among them, and Rumsfeld has long lost his Rumsfeld-ian brio. Instead what you got were white men, and a few women, whose blanched expressions recalled so many CEOs professing shock that the 401k plan had run dry.

Bush’s failure to use TV as a tool of leadership has been especially glaring. “There was no bullhorn moment here in the early days,” as David Gergen pointed out on CNN Wednesday.

Celebrities, though, have managed to avoid the ridicule that usually accompanies their forays into the real world. Even Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” Wednesday begged off openly ridiculing how movie stars had rushed in, calling them “Troop Beverly Hills” but not pushing the joke much further.

The serious news broadcasts, meanwhile, continue to sober up the experience of watching the coverage, rising to heights commensurate with what the nation is feeling. On a given day you are just as well-served catching an hour of ABC’s “Nightline” (where Ted Koppel filed a compelling report Wednesday night on the residents refusing to leave their homes on famed Desire Street) or PBS’ “The NewsHour” (where commentator Richard Rodriguez did a moving essay on the Third World come to America) or BBC America, where reporter Matt Frey, comparing security challenges faced by the military in Iraq and New Orleans, said: “Looters here, insurgents there, enemies galore.” On TV, writing matters.

It’s a slightly less seamless story on the all-news cable networks. While still on the magic carpet ride of its new credibility, cable news has begun to slouch back toward cacophony and self-aggrandizement. Television views on the disaster now are a continual panning-in and panning-out, from dogs stranded on the rooftops of cars to helicopter views of a city still partially submerged and Mississippi coastline ravaged. What has emerged, too, is a macabre tendency to promise views of dead bodies even as they seem to remain ambivalent about how to show them.

As the crisis drags on, that line between good reporting and self-aggrandizing look-at-me-ism is, inevitably, blurring. Reporters are talking a little too much about the opportunities for personal growth they’ve been afforded by covering the disaster. Katie Couric, for instance, posed on a ruined boat in Biloxi, Miss., on the “Today” show Thursday morning. Couric was about to return to New York to take her kid to school, she said, but “I’m so grateful and appreciative that I got to witness the devastation firsthand,” she told Matt Lauer and Al Roker.

In contrast to Couric, there is CNN’s Anderson Cooper. In the past -- standing on a rooftop in Baghdad, say, during last year’s Iraqi elections, or heading into the teeth of past hurricanes with his logo rain slicker -- Cooper’s reports could seem like grandstanding. But in New Orleans he has hit a different stride. To watch him on “Anderson Cooper 360” these days is to sense a reporter nearing existential crisis. The story is in the weary, grim expression on his face, in the way he seems to have claimed first position on the misery and suffering and danger in New Orleans’ flooded 9th Ward. He slouches back toward me-ism every now and then (going on “Oprah” to talk about the impact covering the hurricane has had on him), but he seems hunkered down in the story more than himself. He’s been one of those people carrying a bullhorn.