It's all in the delivery. posted by China

Shocking evidence is emerging that US authorities conspired with a small group of young, able-bodied white people in the dangerous squalor of the New Orleans Superdome, to prioritise a secret plan to get them to safety, leaving behind locals including children, elderly and the sick – the great majority black. And by 'is emerging' I mean 'has been blithely announced on the BBC', by a grateful British recipient of this special treatment.

The military told all non-US citizens to stay together for safety, Ms [Jenny] Sachs added.

They later told them they would be secretly smuggled out in groups of 10 under cover of darkness as it had become too dangerous for them to remain in the stadium, she told BBC News.

"When we were leaving, people were going 'Where are you going?' and giving us looks.

"But the military got us out, which we were all thankful for."

It would be interesting to know if any of these strapping British youths felt shame as they crept away, whether they avoided meeting the eyes of the wheelchair-bound or the babies starving for lack of formula. It seems unlikely from their quotes here. Even the despairing suspicions of the deserted watching them plucked to safety are here made threats for our heroes to pluckily overcome. People were 'giving them looks'. Imagine.

The point here isn't that the authorities were prioritising their evacuation according to class – that's well established, you halt the plebs if you have a hotel to empty – but that this fact, which in a world not morally crippled would be recognised as an abomination, is neither hidden, nor the point of the story. It is at most a passing detail.

Of course there are cover-ups. But there are also plenty of disgraces right out there, everywhere you look. The difficulty can be perceiving them, past news-tone that smoothes out the rough edges of its content.

That news-tone, as others have pointed out, can accommodate a fair degree of variation, even including some off-script anger. While it's right and important to point out how unprecedented the tone of the coverage of the catastrophe has been – this is not, I think, business quite as usual – there's a real danger, in all the hyperbolic, increasingly self-congratulatory guff about how enraged and bolshy the media has been, how it is now 'saved', of focusing on form over the content, of being meta-scandalised about the meta-scandal of how scandalised the media is.

To take a couple of examples that currently have the blogosphere aflutter. The point of this story for us shouldn't be that Shep Smith shouted angrily at his Fox News anchor: the point should be that Shep Smith shouted angrily that the authorities were refusing to let people out, were deliberately turning them back if they make it to a checkpoint.

Or take the now-famous footage of Aaron Broussard, president of a local parish. The germane fact is not that he breaks down crying on Meet The Press, but that he breaks down crying after describing how FEMA refused his stranded community water and fuel, and then, in an astonishingly chilling flourish, cut their emergency communication lines.

MSNBC's Meet The Press told the USA, coast to coast, that FEMA was deliberately cutting off communities from which it had withheld the resources necessary for life. The anchor then suggested that the sobbing Broussard 'take a pause', and changed the subject. Not hurriedly or defensively, but just because that wasn't the point of the story. That I've seen, only one dissident reporter has stressed this fact (scroll to the 4 September report).

It isn't enough to uncover these crimes. They're already uncovered, naked, on the BBC, NBC, and Fox News. With all their angry focus on the 'incompetence' (this could never be planned, after all), the newsreaders just know they're not the point.