Not enough footage

By Saturday the Nepali police had counted more than six hundred dead. Nearly two thousand people are unaccounted for in Nepal alone. A lake formed behind the debris, filled, and began to overflow, and rescue teams on both sides of the border had to climb out of the valley and wait to see whether it would burst.

On Saturday the BBC published a piece about none of that. Its headline said that footage of the Tibet floods isn’t being shown in China, and that we know little about the victims there.

I read it, I was annoyed, and I have spent two days working out whether the annoyance was fair. Some of it is. Some of it isn’t. I want to write down both parts, because I think the BBC is worth holding to a standard, and you don’t get to hold anyone to a standard you won’t apply to yourself.

The part that annoyed me

The article leads on an absence. Not on what happened in the valley, not on what is being done, not on what failed. On the fact that a video which travelled around the world did not travel inside China.

I don’t think I need to see that video. I have seen the still. I know what a wall of mud does to a border post. There is a version of the news business that treats the availability of catastrophe footage as a public good in itself, and I have never been able to make that argument work. What is the public interest being served by my watching people drown at Gyirong Port? Whose situation improves?

If the complaint is that Beijing is withholding a casualty list, that is a serious complaint and it should be the headline. If the complaint is that there isn’t enough dramatic material circulating, that is closer to a complaint about the supply of spectacle, and dressing it in the language of press freedom does not change what it is.

There is also a practical case for keeping people out of a live disaster zone, and it is not a Chinese invention. Disaster researchers call it convergence: the spontaneous flood of volunteers, sightseers, reporters and unsolicited donations that arrives after an event and clogs the one road the responders need. It is well documented after earthquakes and hurricanes. In a Himalayan valley with a wrecked border road, a threatening barrier lake and helicopters as the only reliable way in, restricting access is not obviously sinister.

And here is the fact that made me stop and think. Nepal, which has a free press and no censorship apparatus at all, this week turned down offers of foreign search and rescue teams. South Korea had already sent people. Nepal’s foreign ministry said its own security agencies were handling the operation. Two governments, two very different political systems, both narrowing access to the same valley in the same week.

The part where my own argument runs out

I would like to leave it there, but it doesn’t hold.

Keeping a press pack out of a rescue corridor and deleting material that people inside the valley have already uploaded are not the same instrument. The second one clears no roads and frees no helicopters. It does not explain why Tibetans outside the region are struggling to find out what happened to their relatives. If the goal were purely operational you would expect controlled pool access and a proper casualty bulletin, which is more or less what the International Campaign for Tibet has asked for, while praising the first responders in the same breath.

The BBC also quotes a local party notice telling members to help with relief and to

maintain social order and ensure stability and public confidence

in the disaster areas, with rewards for those who do well and accountability for those who don’t. That is a primary document, not an inference. I can argue about the framing around it. I can’t argue it away.

Then there are the numbers, and they are strange on their face. Nepal reports more than six hundred dead. China reports seven, with 554 missing on its side of the border, a large share of them foreign nationals. There is an innocent reading: the two authorities are using different thresholds for confirming a death, and China’s missing are largely pilgrims and trekkers whose whereabouts are simply unknown in a valley with no infrastructure left. That reading is probably right. But a ratio of five to 558 is the kind of thing independent reporting exists to test, and nobody can test it from Beijing.

I floated one more explanation to myself and then abandoned it: that in an age of synthetic video, a censorship apparatus might be scrubbing first while verifying second. It doesn’t survive contact with the facts. What is being removed is authentic first-hand material, and China’s moderation machinery is fast and extremely well resourced. That isn’t the explanation.

What neither of us knows

Here is what I keep coming back to. Bicker states plainly that foreign journalists cannot enter Tibet without permission. Having stated it, she then writes a piece whose central claim requires exactly the access she has just told us she doesn’t have. From Beijing you cannot distinguish suppression from ordinary chaos at four thousand metres with the roads gone. She writes the story she can source rather than the story she can verify, and the headline doesn’t carry that distinction. Most readers get three paragraphs. Three paragraphs of that piece leave you with the impression that China is ignoring its dead, and the article’s own later paragraphs, the emergency meeting chaired by Xi, the hundreds of responders, the premier on site within days inspecting debris removal, don’t reach the people who stopped reading.

Something worth reporting did happen here, and it isn’t the video. It is also less simple than I assumed when I started writing this.

The obvious line is that the warning system failed. It did, after a fashion. The flash flood system on that border had worked for years, but its water level monitors were calibrated for monsoon flooding rather than for a glacier coming off a mountain under a clear sky, and the upstream stations in Nepal were swept away before they could send anything.

Then ask what a working alarm would actually have bought, and the answer changes depending on where you stand in the valley. The collapse near Langtang Lirung happened at 8:37 in the morning, Nepal time, and registered at magnitude 5.2, strong enough that seismometers in Germany and the United States recorded it. One scientist calculated that the wave covered its first 22 kilometres at an average of 193 kilometres an hour. For Gyirong Port and the settlements at the head of that valley, that is roughly seven minutes, in terrain with vertical walls and no evacuation route worth the name. No siren saves those people. I don’t think it is honest to write as though one would have.

The disaster then ran for 72 kilometres down the Trishuli, and a wave sheds speed as the valley opens out. Bodies were carried 240 kilometres into India. For the towns at the bottom, in Nuwakot, the arithmetic is different: minutes, possibly the better part of an hour. That is enough to get people off a riverbank, if a message reaches them. And the signal existed at 8:37, recorded on the other side of the world. The problem was never that nothing was detectable. It was that a landslide signature had to be recognised as a landslide rather than an earthquake, in real time, and then converted into an alert on a phone in a valley that was losing power. Nepal’s own foreign minister initially said an earthquake had triggered it, which tells you how the signal read at first glance.

That is a narrower claim than the one I would have made two days ago, and I think it is the true one. It is also a failure with a fix, in a range that is warming fast, and it will kill people again. It got a fraction of the attention that the missing footage did.

I am not a China apologist. I don’t think Beijing’s information control in Tibet is benign, and the party notice tells you what it is for. But I hold the BBC to a standard because I use it, I fund it, and I want it to be the source I can hand to someone who disagrees with me. That means leading with what happened rather than with what wasn’t posted, and being honest in the headline about the limits of what a correspondent behind a wall made of fire and mud can actually see.