ThePrint ·
Nepali media put facts over spectacle in flood coverage. Learned what not to do from India
As foreign crews arrived looking for dramatic visuals, Nepali reporters were navigating flooded roads, damaged communications, and dangerous terrain.
Kathmandu: Arjun Paudel’s editor offered him compassionate leave when his village of Sole was destroyed in the 26 August floods in Nepal, taking away eight members of his family. Instead, Paudel joined the team of five reporters from The Kathmandu Post heading directly to flooded districts of Nuwakot and Rasuwa, and spent eight days reporting on the disaster, its impact, and human cost.
“I don’t think I could have taken a leave and sat in my house. Even though it was personal, I needed to see what had happened to my home,” said Paudel, a health reporter at The Kathmandu Post and Kantipur Daily, Nepal’s largest newspapers by circulation.
Paudel was one of many journalists from Nepal who had to deal with both personal and professional challenges after the Rasuwa floods, which led to around 1,400 deaths, with over 5,000 people still missing.
Nepal is no stranger to natural disasters, but the floods put its domestic media on two fronts: as chroniclers of the catastrophe and, at times, its direct victims. Yet, as the tragedy unfolded, Nepali coverage didn’t sink to sensationalism or manufactured emotional spectacles. Newsrooms instead delivered calm, hard-nosed reporting that put facts before the impulse to be the first to break a story.
While foreign crews arrived looking for dramatic visuals, Nepali reporters were navigating flooded roads, damaged communications, and dangerous terrain—sometimes on foot, sometimes by helicopter—to report what was happening beyond the most visible devastation. The top five newsrooms, including the Kantipur Media Group, Himalaya TV, Ratopati, Nepali Times, and Himal Khabar, sent over 100 reporters to the field and published more than 1,000 reports in the weeks since the floods.
It was also a revealing moment for a media industry that, in its modern independent form, is only about three decades old.
“We had an editorial policy in the newsroom that we would rather be a few minutes late, or not publish a story at all, than publish a false or misleading story,” said Gokarna Awasthi, Editor-in-Chief, Kathmandu Post and Kantipur Daily. “We’re trying to build trust in our journalism, not just rush to publish.”
By 9:30 am on the morning of 26 August, news of a massive flood in the Bhote Koshi River, which travelled down the Trishuli basin to Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts in northern Nepal, had reached Kathmandu’s newsrooms. For some, the source was videos on the internet. For others, it was frantic calls from parents and relatives who were near the flood site.
“I was on my way to the office when I got a call from my father, who lives in Betrawati in Rasuwa. He told me there’s a huge flood, and he seemed so scared,” said Ramesh Kumar, a journalist with Himal Khabar.
By the time Kumar reached the Himal Khabar office in Patan Dhoka and told his editors, videos of the floods were already circulating on Facebook and X. His newsroom, like others in the city, went into action mode.
“The roads were destroyed, there was no cell network in those districts, so the biggest issue was getting there and actually verifying the information,” said Umesh Chauhan, Group Editor, Himalaya TV and Online Khabar.
While Chauhan’s Himalaya TV—one of the largest TV news channel in Nepal after Kantipur—decided to hire a chopper and send reporters to the border regions of Timure and Rasuwagadhi, The Kathmandu Post and Himal Khabar sent their journalists by car to the nearest accessible flood site in Bidur.
“We were the first journalists to reach the Nepal-Tibet border site by helicopter, but we didn’t publicise it,” said Chauhan. “Because reaching there was not the story. What our journalists did once they reached, that was the story.”
While newsrooms equipped their teams with a basic first aid kit and essentials, neither the editors nor the reporters truly knew what they were walking into.
A few hours after the floods, when Chauhan’s reporters reached Timure town at the Nepal-Tibet border by helicopter, the scene was unrecognisable. The river had ripped through the settlement, carrying away homes, vehicles, roads, and bridges, leaving thick brown debris spread across what had been the valley. While they could not land the helicopter for safety reasons, the visuals they brought back were the first aerial shots of the floods by a newsroom.
“The reason we wanted those visuals was to tell not just Nepal, but the rest of the world, what the extent of devastation was,” said Chauhan. “It also helped journalists from all over the world to see the scale of the floods, and send international crews to cover it.”
Reporters such as Kumar and Paudel were encountering similar sights on the ground, as they arrived in the Nuwakot capital Bidur, the closest accessible region by road from Kathmandu. A few hundred metres from Bidur, Trishuli Bazaar lay inundated with debris and silt, and with no electricity or internet. The site was one of panic and chaos.
“I don’t know how to describe what I saw—people were panic-stricken, running around,” recalled Kumar, who went on to Betrawati, his village, the next day. “In Betrawati, I saw bodies in the river… I had nightmares for days.”