You should not stereotype all media coverage. I have found all sorts of coverage on all sorts of places damaged by Katrina, its been very extensive. As an aside: cheap shots at various political parties do not add materially to the debate and often serve to homogenise the audience of the discussion board, personally I find this very tedious. Anyway back to the topic: New Orleans got most of the mainstream coverage for some very practical reasons, some of which are:
1) Its a location most people could place on a map, many US folk have memories of New Orleans, how many of us have memories of Picayune? Of course that doesn't diminish the extent of the tragedy there but the reality is most of us know New Orleans.
2) The Geography of the city and the failure of the levees make the disaster in part a man-made tragedy, from a purely weather orientated perspective there is not much more to Gulfport other than "Katrina destroyed all - mankind had little say in it"
3) The human face of the catastrophie take on all sorts of forms in New Orleans, folk who lost their houses, folk who looted, folk who survived days in attics, folk who made the now eerily accurate predictions of flooding, folk who were stranded by authorities. For the rest of the Delta there was not as much depth to the story.
In short the reason that mainstream press focuses on New Orleans is because that is where the mainstream stories are richer and make for better press. Afterall these folks make their money selling information.

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