  We calculate temporal correlators and their spectral functions with meson
quantum numbers in the deconfined phase of QCD using the hard thermal loop
(HTL) approximation for the quark propagator. Although this approach does not
result in a complete next-to-leading order perturbative calculation it takes
into account important medium effects such as thermal quark masses and Landau
damping in the quark-gluon plasma. We show that both effects lead to competing
modifications of the free mesonic correlation functions. We find that
correlators in scalar channels are only moderately influenced by the HTL medium
effects, while the HTL-vertex corrections lead to divergent vector correlators.
