Stakes:

The week has provided plenty of scope for reporting at its finest and at its most frustrating. The Senate hearings on Judge Roberts' nomination to head the high court provided plenty of the latter. The careful parsing of terms, the dissection of arcane points of procedure, coupled with the high incidence of windy rhetoric, created an environment as opaque to understanding as a Japanese Noh play. Efforts to tease reportable information from the process reminded me of Cold War journalists who sought to divine Soviet policy from seeing who stood next to whom on Red Square reviewing stands.

The wake of Katrina, however, has provided some of the most stirring and disturbing reporting I have ever seen or heard. Not that narratives of disaster don't have their own protocols and cliches--but the immediacy and power of human suffering carries through regardless. A person staring into the empty cellar hole of his former life is fully transparent to our understanding. And, as with the storm victim who shouted out his rage to the vice-president, he is beyond the heed of protocol. This is a fact that has relevance to both the top stories of the week: the rules of the game are of concern only to those who are left with something to put on the table.