In media schools, they teach you that news is whatever is out of the ordinary. This is the woman-bites-bitch rule of journalism. When positive becomes commonplace, it is negative that makes the news. Thousands of buses travel safely to their destinations every day. That does not make news. It is the bus that falls into the Trisuli that is reported.

Having said that, buses are now falling so frequently into the Trisuli that it takes a threshold fatality of at least three passengers before it is even reported by the national news agency. Usually, it needs at least ten dead to be broadcast on Radio Nepal (unless some bigwig is on board), and 15 to make it to the evening television news. Like a tree that topples in the middle of a forest, unless there is someone there to witness the event, it hasn't happened.

It is the same with the Maoist body count. When a schoolteacher is hacked to death in Gorkha, or a VDC chairman is shot in Baglung while jogging, it is for the inside pages. A day after we wrote an editorial on this subject earlier this month, eleven policemen were killed in Kalikot. It was a blip in the media radar screens, and faded away within a day. The surnames of those killed in Kalikot showed they represented castes and communities from Dhankuta to Dadeldhura-sons of poor Nepali families who joined the police because they needed jobs. Only one newspaper knelt to interview the widow of the constable from Dang, and chronicled the tragedy for a far-away family of one life lost.

The other thing about news is the pace with which it happens. Sudden events are news, tragedies that unfold slowly are not news. Thousands of babies drying up and dying of diarrhoeal dehydration do not make it to the news. To take notice, media demands that they die suddenly and spectacularly. So, the fact that more Nepali mothers die at childbirth than anywhere else in the world is not really newsworthy for us.

It is a big dilemma for the Nepali media to cover corruption. When corruption becomes widespread, and even accepted, it is not news anymore. In fact, coverage of corruption is so rare that when it does happen the average reader's reaction is that the story is motivated and media itself is corrupt. The nasty Conde Naste Traveller has now pronounce Nepal "one of the most corrupt countries on earth" Where do you even begin to cover graft when everything is so graft-ridden? How do you prioritise theft: by magnitude of the money involved, by the misery it generates, by the sheer injustice, or a blatant disregard of the common good? Which is the bigger evil: a petrol pump owner who openly admits mixing cheaper kerosene in diesel, an international civil servant who takes kickbacks on maternity hospitals, a ministry which makes $150 for every hour that a leased jet is in the air?

All right, if evil is so rife this is what we will do: we will cover the out-of-ordinary. We will profile honest bureaucrats, the immigration officer who refuses to be on the take, the MP who walks to the House, the policewoman who will insist that you pass your driving test, VDC chairmen who work tirelessly to ensure the well-being of their constituents. These Nepalis are news because they are extraordinary.

Believe it or not

We have heard of hotel workers going on strike, but only in Nepal will you see hotel owners throwing guests out into the streets as we saw on Monday. This must belong somewhere in Ripley's Believe It Or Not. So we are now back to square one. If all it took was the prime minister's "assurance" to persuade hotel owners to open up for business why didn't the prime minister give them that assurance at the beginning of November? If all it took was a meeting with the deputy prime minister to tell the party-controlled unions to get back to work why didn't he do that earlier? Instead, we had this tripartite charade of hotelwallahs, unions and the government playing hide-and-seek. For what? To bring us back to where we started. Nothing has been resolved: the same cliffhanger situation is slated for a repeat end-January.

There we have it: hotels may be open for business but there are no guests because everyone has gone somewhere else. Tour operators in Japan and Europe are not going to be in a hurry to send guests our way. The Christmas and New Years booking looks bleak. Meanwhile, the country's economy is suffering losses of up to Rs 265 million a week. Way to go, everyone!