Back in April, in a post titled, "Absolutely Fabulist", I wrote:

"Fabulous" is a word that has become primarily known for meaning great or wonderful or marvelous. But as Webster's' online dictionary notes, its primary meaning is:

resembling or suggesting a fable: of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature [fabulous wealth]

It's telling that the synonym that Webster's recommends for the word is fictitious.

So let's look at how Webster's definition of the word applies to the mainstream media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

In a post titled, "No Accurate Death Toll Estimates Please, We're The MSM", Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes:

James Pinkerton thinks Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that reports of the death of the MSM were greatly exaggerated. He's right. The MSM was able to write the first draft of this story in a biased and misleading fashion, to the detriment of President Bush. Blogs and other new media were unable to prevent or counteract this. As Pinkerton puts it, "the MSM got there firstest with the mostest."

However, though the MSM may have been able, in the short term, to trim two or three points from the approval rating of a president who can't run for re-election, there's a good chance it did so at a lasting cost to its diminishing credibility. For it seems likely that the one piece of critical concrete information the MSM supplied about the hurricane -- the estimated death toll of 10,000 people -- will prove to be wildly excessive.

It will do the MSM and its apologists no good to say that they were merely setting an upper limit. People will remember the frightening number, not the weasel words that may have accompanied it. Nor, as Glenn Reyonolds suggests, will it be much use to say, as some have, that the number came from Mayor Nagin. It was the MSM's reliance on the ravings of Nagin that served as the springboard for the "blame Bush" coverage. The MSM hitched its wagon to an incompetent, hysterical mayor in full CYA mode. It will have to live with the consequences. The main consequence is that the MSM appears to have gotten the single most important fact about Katrina wrong. The public is likely to remember.

Well, some will at least.

Someone known for telling fables is a fabulist. And recently, several bloggers have been discussing the media's willingness to openly embrace fabulism and run with it: CNN's Jonathan Klein (the man who gave the Blogosphere its dress code) calls it "storytelling". Ace of Spades pungently describes CNN's "storytelling" as consisting of:

some sort of hybrid of news and strong dramatic narrative. You know--kind of made-up fictitious s*** with a pleasing emotional resonance.

In a way, it's curious to see the media moving further and further way from the appearance of objectivity. As Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote a couple of months after President Bush was reelected:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it's almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences — he's held far fewer than any modern predecessor — and doesn't seem to agree that the media has any "right" to know what's really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate.

Yes, I know: A purely objective viewpoint does not exist in the cosmos or in politics. Yes, I know: Today's media foodfights are mild compared with the viciousness of pamphleteers and partisan newspapers of old, from colonial times forward. Yes, I know: The notion of a neutral "mainstream" national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.

In its place is a media which currently thinks that "storytelling" is better than even the perceived appearance of neutrally disgorging facts. I can't help but wonder which demographic Klein believes this fabulist approach will appeal to.

Update: Pejman Yousefzadeh also has some thoughts on the media's coverage of Katrina.