Press Clips, from the Village Voice, gets it partially right.

In an article headlined The Caste System: Media biggies ignored Times-Picayune's warnings - at everyone's peril, Sydney H. Schanberg, wrote in part:

The Katrina disaster has peeled back the veil from many of America's shames and weaknesses. One of them is the press's caste system.

...the nation's media biggies, acting in character, had pretty much ignored the year-in-year-out reporting by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which kept warning that a hurricane tragedy of this magnitude was certain to befall the Gulf city. A five-part Times-Picayune series three years ago described, in eerie detail, the likely evacuation that actually happened, leaving behind New Orleans's poorest inhabitants.

The paper wrote: "The risk is growing greater. . . . Eventually a major hurricane will hit New Orleans head on. . . . It's just a matter of time. . . . People left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive . . . "

Sadly, there's nothing new about the national press's pretending that important stories uncovered by regional papers or alternative papers like this one were trees that had fallen in a deserted forest. In short, these stories don't exist, except when the biggies deign to cannibalize them, usually giving little credit to the papers of origin.

Some of this smugness has been penetrated by the arrival of the Internet and its infinite space for everyone with a computer to critique everything around them, including the press. Yet the caste system still exists - in all arenas, not just journalism - and will continue to ignore important others as long as the insecure human species determinedly insists on pecking orders.

The Washington press corps - for that matter, all press corps that cover national governments - consider themselves an elite. In one sense they are. Most of the members were chosen for the lofty assignment because of the real skills and energy they had shown when they served, so to speak, as shoe-leather reporters in the trenches. But in the end, despite those skills, many of them soften by being too close to power - or succumb to envy or awe of power. Whether it's Washington or New Delhi, the phenomenon is the same.

The Washington press corps is a caste system within itself. Reporters who work for small papers don't get to sit in the front at presidential press conferences.

...And with the increasing conglomeration of the industry into huge chains bent on homogenizing the news into one-size-fits-all, will fewer and fewer papers maintain a blood link to their communities - as used to be the standard?

But what about the media caste system? Will it persist?...

Any journalism elder like myself comes to know that solid reporting is being done all over this country. And as an elder, I have heard people at other New York City papers sneer at the work of now deceased New York Newsday, when it had put their metro coverage to shame. I have also heard sneers about the Voice's coverage of politics and government, which on a regular basis smokes out more government corruption than any of the sneerers do.

I would argue that if the mainstream papers in New York had followed up on the Voice's coverage of George Pataki's mottled history when he was running for governor for the first time in 1994, the state might have been spared 12 years of misguided, costly, crony governance.

The caste system carries a heavy cost. It weakens the news business.

Mr. Schanberg is onto something important, but he misses an important point. Most of the reporters working for the Times-Picayune went to journalism schools, such as the University of Alabama, while many of the reporters working for the media elites have degrees in English from Ivy League schools. So they come from rich families and learn how to write pretty sentences.

Perhaps they learned about Shakespeare, who wrote "all the world's a stage."

They learned how to play the game well, much like Karl Rove and President George W. Bush.

But they failed to learn how to ask couragious questions and dig out the facts and tell the truth.

For that, these days, readers would be better served searching out the better blogs - the modern equivalents of the pamphleteers who pushed this country toward Revolution in the late 1700s.

Maybe it is time for another revolution, and not just a technological revolution. Remember what happened to the elites in France.