During last week’s bonfire of Katrina navel-gazing, there was virtually no mention of the hyperventilating and inaccurate media reports, even though this newspaper and the Times-Picayune (among others) received accolades for debunking the hysteria less than a month after the hurricane. Yet last week’s saturation coverage contained little or no mention of the media’s malpractice. It’s as if it never happened.

Why? I think the answer is complex, but three factors are surely involved. One, the media are often good watchdogs of government but rarely of themselves. While recycling old complaints about government is permissible, dwelling on your colleagues’ failures — or your own — just isn’t done.

Two, the media have convinced themselves that they did a wonderful job covering Katrina. Dan Rather spoke for his colleagues when he said “everybody across the board did such a good job.” It was one of the “quintessential great moments in television news . . . right there with the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate coverage, you name it.”

And, lastly, journalists are invested in the dominant narratives of Katrina, and they’ll be damned if they’ll let go, particularly if it comes at the expense of their own credibility, or make Bush’s mistakes seem a little less horrendous.

No, it would be better, and much easier, to print the legend.

Read it all.

Clergymen struggling to comfort the afflicted in New Orleans are finding they, too, need someone to listen to their troubles.

The sight of misery all around them — and the combined burden of helping others put their lives back together while repairing their own homes and places of worship — are taking a spiritual and psychological toll on the city’s ministers, priests and rabbis, many of whom are in counseling two years after Hurricane Katrina.

Almost every local Episcopal minister is in counseling, including Bishop Charles Jenkins himself, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Jenkins, whose home in suburban Slidell was so badly damaged by Katrina that it was 10 months before he and his wife could move back in, said he has suffered from depression, faulty short-term memory, and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.

Low-flying helicopters sometimes cause flashbacks to the near-despair — the “dark night of the soul” — into which he was once plunged, he said. He said the experience felt “like the absence of God” — a lonely and frightening sensation.

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Father Bill Terry of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in New Orleans wants everyone to know what’s happening in New Orleans: too many murders with too few people held accountable.

He keeps track of the slayings on what he calls the “murder board,” a plastic board that hangs outside his church. He started listing murder victims earlier this year to humanize the headlines.

At first, the names were neatly typed by a printer. But as the killings continued at a rampant pace, he says, he resorted to adding victims’ names by hand with permanent marker.

“Numbers are very easy to deal with emotionally. When it becomes a human being, then we start to personalize and it’s harder to deal with. I want people to squirm. I want people to feel uncomfortable about the murders going on in the city,” Father Bill told CNN.

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I’ve taken fierce pride in being a local. When I travel I’m a junky for talk about the city. Someone will ask “So, how is it down there?” I launch into a litany. There are busted traffic lights, leaky sewer lines, mountains of debris, the skyrocketing murder rate, miles of desolation, and the levees still aren’t fixed. But you should come, I say. It’s like a battered beauty queen. Hard to look at, and messed up even more on the inside, but still so regal and charming. This is where the listener I’ve taken hostage turns away slowly to engage someone less insane.

They don’t understand that I’m in love. I talk to friends about New Orleans like a dysfunctional romance. I gush over it one day, then call up bawling and heartbroken the next. Why can’t it change? Stop being self-destructive and violent? It has so much potential.

Recently, my blinders started to come off. It was building for awhile. My friend Helen Hill was murdered in her home;other friends have been mugged. We don’t go out much any more…

But then there was this hot Friday night last month. I went on the perfect date with New Orleans . Saw live, local music, danced with friends on the stage, then headed home through my neighborhood of craftsman cottages and angel trumpet trees.

A block from my door, I was attacked from behind by a stranger. I escaped, with the help of my roommate. The case is moving forward, so I can’t say much more than that.

Now I’m a jilted lover of the city. I’m angry and confused. Which is the real New Orleans? The one that’s violent and desperate? Or the one that coos softly, and caresses me? The answer, of course, is both.

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