Off the Record 147: Where do young Nepalis get their news?
Issue 147 • 12 July 2024
It’s July 12, 2024, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from rainy Kathmandu. The rains are out in full force, and while farmers welcome the rains for their harvest, those living on the margins are not so pleased. Incessant rain means that rivers rise from their banks and flood their homes. Out in the mofussil, floods, and landslides occur with frightening intensity, sweeping homes and properties and killing dozens.
It’s been a slow week for the news, though. Politics is stagnant, with the parties just waiting for Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal to exit. Horsetrading has been rampant within the Nepali Congress and the UML as each tries to snag powerful ministries. Still, the news below:
Dahal fails floor test
On Friday, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal sought a vote of confidence from the House of Representatives for the fifth time in his nearly two-year-long tenure. Each time, he’s been forced to undergo a floor test after either breaking an alliance or an alliance partner abandoning him. This time is the same. The UML announced earlier in July that it would be pulling out of the Dahal government and tying up with the Nepali Congress to form its own government. The expectation was that Dahal would resign after this announcement, but he chose to continue, hoping that perhaps schisms would appear between the two new partners. Issues regarding power-sharing have arisen, but they’re not significant enough to break the newfound bond. Not just yet. And Dahal was handed an ignominious defeat.
Dahal received a measly 63 votes — 32 votes from his Maoist party, 21 votes from the Rastriya Swatantra Party, and 10 votes from the Unified Socialists, not anywhere near the 138-vote majority required. An overwhelming 194 voted against him, with the Nepali Congress and the UML holding 166 votes, sealing Dahal’s fate. And so, Dahal and his entire Cabinet are now forced to resign, paving the way for a new government composed of the UML, the Congress, and whoever decides to tie up with them for their share of power. This isn’t sad; it’s just depressing. Every few years, the same cycle repeats. Each party demands its own pound of flesh, everything else be damned.
Over 60 passengers missing after landslide
Early Friday morning, two passenger buses bound for Kathmandu were swept away in Chitwan by a massive landslide triggered by heavy rainfall. Over 60 people are missing, most of them feared dead, as the buses were pushed off the highway and into the Trishuli River below. The Nepal Army is conducting rescue operations, but there have been no more updates as of this writing.
Not including this current tragedy, 88 people have already died in monsoon-related accidents this year. A further 106 have been injured, and half a dozen are missing. This happens every year. Floods and landslides kill dozens of people across the country. According to Kantipur, 1,800 people died in monsoon-related accidents in the past 10 years. That’s an average of 180 people every year. And this year looks like it’s no different. On Thursday, a landslide triggered by heavy rains in Kaski district buried seven members of a single family, killing all of them. A further 11 people have died in that district alone this monsoon season.
The monsoon is the lifeblood of Nepali farmers and Nepal’s agriculture sector. But as much as the rains sustain life, they also take life. Given Nepal’s rugged geography, preventing such accidents in totality is difficult, but it is possible to minimize loss of life and property. Early warning systems must be instituted, and local governments must be more proactive in disaster risk reduction and management. One easy solution is to stop cutting the hills in half to build roads. Local governments have been financing roads all over their jurisdiction, often without Environmental Impact Assessments, leading to a weakening of the soil, which in turn triggers landslides. The rampant mining of riverbeds across the country also triggers floods as river banks are destroyed, encroached upon, and settled. Even if these two activities are reined in, monsoon deaths could be significantly minimized.
Fears of a dengue outbreak
Alongside the floods and landslides, another perennial worry for Nepal is the mosquito. With the rains come the mosquitos, and with the mosquitos come dengue. A disease that only started appearing in the 2000s has become a yearly phenomenon. Dengue now afflicts thousands across the country, resulting in over a dozen deaths. Things were particularly bad in 2022 when 88 people died of dengue. Last year too, 20 people died and over 52,000 were infected. This year, over 1,400 people have been infected with dengue, reaching 73 out of Nepal’s 77 districts. Only the high mountainous districts of Mustang, Dolpa, Humla, and Jumla have been spared so far.
Things are dire in urban centers, especially Kathmandu city, where an average of 18 people get dengue daily. In cities, there are more areas where the dengue mosquito can breed and multiply. Small pools and ponds, containers of standing water, and semi-permanent puddles in streets and empty lots all provide the perfect breeding ground for the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads dengue. People also live in close proximity, facilitating the spread of the disease. Furthermore, many people don’t go to the hospital; instead, they treat their high fever and body aches at home. Many don’t even realize they have dengue, believing it to be just another seasonal chill.
So, if you’re in Nepal, put on your Odomos, wear long sleeves and pants, and do not leave out any containers with standing water.
Sumana Shrestha clarifies that she is not a foreign citizen
Things got ridiculous a while ago; now it’s just farcical. It’s almost like those accusing Sumana Shrestha of various ills and wrongdoings are enjoying playing the part of the misogynistic xenophobe. If it’s not the clothes she’s wearing, then it’s her spouse's nationality. Shrestha, the current Minister for Education, is married to a Polish man, and this has rankled Nepal’s strident nationalists to no end. Ever since Shrestha was inducted into the House of Representatives, she has been suspected of being a ‘foreign national’ or holding foreign permanent residency. Some have even looked up Polish citizenship laws and found that anyone married to a Polish citizen can claim citizenship.
Things have gotten so bad that someone registered a formal complaint with the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority, leading the National Vigilance Center, a government entity responsible for overseeing the work of ministers and ministries, to demand clarification. On Wednesday, Shrestha thus was forced to respond publicly on social media, saying that she held no foreign citizenship or permanent residency anywhere else. She pointed out the absurdity of trying to prove a negative. When someone accuses you of holding foreign citizenship, and you don’t, how do you prove it? She also raised the deeper issue here — Nepali men seem to assume that any Nepali woman would immediately choose to be a foreign citizen should the option present itself. This infantilizes women and is the outcome of a deeply parochial mindset, the very same mindset that is behind Nepal’s unequal citizenship laws.
All of this because so many men, particularly of a certain class and caste who swear loyalty to certain parties, have not been able to accept someone as qualified and dedicated to her job as Shrestha. She has faced the brunt of the criticism, even though the Rastriya Swatantra Party has numerous other ministers in government at this very moment. Let’s recall Sujata Koirala, the daughter of Congress grand statesman Girija Prasad Koirala. She was once Minister for Foreign Affairs and remains a senior politician within the Congress party. She has been married to a German citizen for decades and it has never been a problem for anyone.
One small note before I move on. Note this line in a report on this whole issue by Republica:
If it doesn’t jump out at you, let me point out what offends me: “Shrestha said that her husband is a citizen of Poland, but she has not yet obtained citizenship of Poland.” Not yet, implying that she might in the future but hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Because, of course, why wouldn’t she? It doesn’t make sense for Nepalis not to take foreign citizenship if the option presents itself, right? This is why language matters.
And that’s it for this week. Since it’s a slow news week, here’s a deep dive into something my regular readers might not be aware of.
The deep dive: Where do young Nepalis get their news?
Image generated with Bing AI
About three or four years ago, when I was teaching creative writing to third-year Bachelor’s in Media Studies students at Kathmandu University, I asked the class of about 30 students where they got their news. A significant majority responded with ‘social media’. I put the same question to journalism students from a Kathmandu college affiliated with Tribhuvan University when they came to visit the offices of The Kathmandu Post. An even smaller number said they read the papers or the news portals. Almost all of them said that they preferred social media for their news.
I don’t imagine things have changed much since then. Whenever I meet anyone in their early to mid-20s, I ask them about their media consumption, and the answer invariably comes back — social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube are where young Nepalis are getting their news from. Until a few years ago, it was social media pages like Routine of Nepal Banda (RONB), an entity I’ve mentioned in this newsletter many times. RONB once held such significant sway over the minds of young people that it played a critical role in getting Balen Shah elected as mayor of Kathmandu.
RONB’s success, however, was its own downfall. RONB began to accept paid promotions and advertisements without disclosing them. The page was also embroiled in a scandal involving Balen Shah, and its partisanship was so evident that even its die-hard supporters deserted it. The page is no longer as popular or influential as it used to be. Copycats, like NoNextQuestion, have attempted to mimic RONB’s content with some success. But while they have the Instagram numbers, they have little of the reach or influence that RONB exercised over the minds of vast hordes of teenagers and young adults.
RONB was just a symptom of the changing patterns of media consumption, especially among young Nepalis aged anywhere from 15 to 35. It should worry traditional media outlets like newspapers, radios, and television that this critical chunk of the population, a significant proportion of the voting public, is not reading, listening to, or watching them anymore. But legacy media houses like Kantipur, Nagarik, and Annapurna have been slow even to acknowledge this shift, let alone adapt.
And so, we come to now, when a (relatively) new form of media is capturing the young Nepali imagination — YouTube video explainers. There are YouTube ‘journalists’ — anyone with a camera and a lapel mic that they can thrust into people’s faces — and podcasters — Joe Rogan clones who give all their guests a question-free platform to spout their agendas. These two deserve deep dives on their own, but in this newsletter, I’d like to talk about the plethora of Nepali YouTube channels that make ‘explainers,’ i.e., videos that take a deeper look into one issue and attempt to explain it in detail. Exactly what I do in this newsletter, only on video.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the most popular explainer channels on YouTube:
Anand Nepal, who calls himself the “first video blogger of Nepal’, started his channel in 2009 and has 923k subscribers with 360 videos.
Tanka Dhakal, a Microsoft engineer, has had his channel since 2006 but only started posting explainers about two years ago. He has 264k subscribers and 455 videos.
The ‘Why So Offended’ channel started in 2012 and has 187k subscribers with 122 videos.
The ‘Random Nepali’ channel started in 2015 and has 251k subscribers with 191 videos.
The Nepali Comment started in March 2020 and has 330k subscribers with 122 videos.
In-Depth Story started posting explainers about four years ago and has 342k subscribers with 241 videos.
And these are only the larger channels. There are many more smaller ones: Misguided Nepal (122k subscribers), Project Kura (162k subscribers), Thaha (98.3k subscribers), Sujan Pokhrel (75.5k subscribers), and Curious Nepal (34.9k subscribers). I’ve certainly missed some, but you get the gist. There are now over a dozen Nepali YouTube explainer channels, and their videos receive hundreds of thousands, sometimes over a million, views each. This is very significant, something the media industry should’ve noticed by now.
And they have, somewhat. The Kathmandu Post started a video podcast called ‘Idea of Nepal’ about six months ago. The format is static; the host, editor Biswas Baral, is wooden and uncharismatic, and the content is old hat. Kantipur Daily too started an ‘explainer’ type video series called Front Page, hosted by editor-in-chief Umesh Chauhan, just about a month ago. Personally, both these editors need to step aside and let someone with a better screen presence sit in front of the camera. There’s no reason the editor has to be the star of the show. An editor’s role is to guide the process, not place himself front and center.
Former Kantipur editor-in-chief Sudheer Sharma has also started his own podcast-cum-commentary channel, Ani Aba. The channel started about three months ago and has collected 9.79k subscribers. None of these channels have done well, albeit they just started this year. Each video has just a few thousand views; some don’t even have that. You’d expect a media house like Kantipur, which has its own television network, to put more jazz into its videos. Instead, the videos are boring, and no one’s watching them. On the other hand, Sudheer Sharma has apparently hired a good team of editors, as his commentary videos are well-made. His podcasts, however, are more academic, so I don’t expect them to have the kind of audience that other channels do. I expect he will do better than The Kathmandu Post or Kantipur.
I hope it is clear that Nepal is currently undergoing a sea change in the news medium. No longer does most of Nepal turn to the newspaper, the radio, or the television to learn what’s happening; Nepalis take out their mobile phones and either scroll down their social media feeds or turn to YouTube to watch their favorite YouTubers explain the latest political scandal in an easy-to-understand graphical package. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, it shows that Nepalis, especially the young, are still interested in learning about current events, history, politics, society, and culture. The Nepali Comment has 44 million views across all its videos; those views are not from bots or foreigners; they’re all Nepalis interested in the Nepali-language content that the channel is serving up. This tells us in the media industry that the audience is still out there; the traditional mainstream media just hasn’t been able to reach them.
On the other hand, there are *ahem* issues. These YouTubers aren’t journalists or even researchers. They don’t do reporting. Their commentary depends on the mainstream newspapers and news outlets they are replacing. They’re collecting their millions of views on the backs of the hard work done by actual journalists. This is not illegal or even unethical. I do pretty much the same thing, although I take care to give credit and provide linkbacks. But I understand why journalists and media houses might take umbrage at a YouTuber taking their reporting, repackaging it, adding some commentary, and raking in thousands of dollars in views from YouTube. It’s worse when some channels don’t even give credit or provide sources.
Besides sourcing, there’s also journalistic rigor. In newsrooms, any report goes through multiple layers of scrutiny — from the journalist to the desk editor, the copy editor, and sometimes even the chief editor. At each level, inconsistencies are ironed out, loopholes are plugged, and the story is made foolproof. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. YouTube channels don’t have that kind of layering, and there is always a danger that the next video will have serious lapses or present a very one-sided explainer. Objectivity shouldn’t matter, as these are commentary channels that are already highly subjective, but the channels themselves purport to objectivity; they claim that they’re presenting an unbiased take on the issue at hand. But there’s no such thing. Commentary is inherently subjective.
It is also easy for these channels to go the RONB route and put any semblance of journalism aside when business comes calling. For instance, five months ago, In-Depth Story published a video called ‘Why government is planning to stop EVs”. The video is one long ad for an electric scooter, surrounded by news and commentary, all aimed at promoting electric vehicles, particularly their video sponsor. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Numerous comments too pointed out that the video is an advertisement and that they would do better to separate their content from their advertising. If they decide to do sponsored content or native advertising, they need to label it as such clearly. So if one scooter brand offered sponsorship and In-Depth Story was more than happy to create an entire video around their product, who’s to say that tomorrow, the Nepali Congress or the UML won’t come calling with the same offer? Who’s to say they haven’t already?
These are all issues that these channels will have to contend with going forward. We are currently at an inflection point regarding media consumption, but everything depends on whether these YouTube channels live up to their potential. Will they be the next Jon Stewart of political commentary, the John Oliver of explainers, or the Alex Ross of unhinged conspiracies and shady endorsement deals?
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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