Media: With the one-year anniversary of Katrina behind us, the media-fed myth that New Orleans was destroyed due to federal negligence has congealed in the public's mind. It's not true.

We're not saying the U.S. government — especially FEMA — covered itself in glory after the hurricane. It didn't, and we're not making excuses.

But there's a big difference between the near-criminal negligence implied by media coverage over the past year and the real story of the effort to clean up and save lives after an unexpected natural disaster.

Looking at the media coverage of the anniversary Tuesday, it seems people are still trying to fix blame.

Appearing on NBC, former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown blamed higher-ups for the inadequate federal response. Specifically, he pointed a finger at President Bush and Michael Chertoff, homeland security chief.

Brown's self-serving comments aren't true. He's the one who headed FEMA — not Bush or Chertoff. His comment that he was "low man on the totem pole" is pathetic. As so many other things said over the past year, it was uttered without the media challenging its veracity. Why? The statement impugned Bush.

That's not surprising. For the media, Katrina always was more about politics and mythmaking than about reporting and telling the truth. Katrina became a part of a long story line spun relentlessly by the press, of White House ineptitude in the face of disaster and lack of concern for the poor.

As part of this, the media got caught up in telling some big fibs or exaggerating some events while ignoring others.

Take the idea that the federal response was "inadequate" or "incompetent." Granted, that might be said of some of FEMA's efforts, which were poor. But a big story that never got told was how heroically the National Guard (and Coast Guard) performed before, during and after the storm, saving tens of thousands of lives. The mainstream media basically ignored this.

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By some estimates, the Guard saved 50,000 lives — maybe more. If a big deal was made of this, we didn't hear about it. We had to search out this information on blogs and through government Web sites. It should have been splashed across TV screens and the front pages of our nation's media. It was a truly heroic moment.