Dressed now in the faded, bloodcaked fatigues he took off a National Guardsman he’d found beaten to death in the Treme St corridor, FOXNews’ Shepard Smith stands motionless before the listing skeletal remains of what was once a Best Western on Rampart St, his head shaved clean, jaw stiff, chin ticked slightly upward and pointing toward the on-camera spot his crew is using to augment the firelight from fifteen or so torches held by a gang of lumbering, topless refugees the sunburned anchor rounded up earlier from the wreckage of the Iberville projects.

On either side of him, a series of staggered, 8 foot-to-10 foot pikes fashioned from driftwood and stretches of gothic metal gatework salvaged from the standing water, hold the wide-eyed heads of a CNN camera crew and a couple of photogs from the Associated Press—“errand boys,” Smith tells the camera’s blinking red eye, “sent to by grocery clerks to collect my Pulitzer.”