Four days after a glacier collapsed above the Nepal-Tibet border and sent a wall of debris through the Bhote Koshi valley, here is the disaster according to five newsrooms: 2,478 missing. "Nearly 2,500" missing. 626 dead. 675 dead. And "over 550" missing — that last one on the Chinese side of the mountain, where the cameras stop working. The numbers move hourly, and that's not the scandal; tolls in a live catastrophe always do. The scandal is what each outlet's ledger decided to include. Walk with us. * The Guardian is running the disaster like an accountant with a conscience: "Search continues as number missing in Nepal-Tibet floods rises to 2,478." Not "about 2,500" — 2,478, a number you only get by adding up official lists and revising them in public. Its second story sources the scale to somebody: "At least 93,000 'in great need' after Nepal-Tibet flash floods, says Red Cross." And yes, it also has "Families of 33 missing Britons rush to Nepal" — everyone counts their own nationals, and the Guardian at least kept the arithmetic and the passports in separate headlines. * Bloomberg went with "Nepal and China Step Up Rescue Efforts With Nearly 2,500 Missing After Floods." Look at the grammatical subject. Four days in, the sentence isn't about the missing — they're in the prepositional trailer. The actors are two governments, stepping up. That's the competence frame: the disaster as a management story, states performing logistics. It's not false. It's just the view from the ministry window. * The Mirror's ledger: "Hundreds of bodies 'no longer identifiable' as Nepal flood death toll hits 626 - 33 Brits missing." Day one, regular readers will remember, the Mirror's headline protagonist was a 'heartbroken' King Charles. By day four the King has been rotated out and the raw horror has been rotated in, with the Brit count welded to the toll like a sidecar. We said it then and it holds: counting your own nationals is an industry-wide reflex, not a Mirror invention. The Mirror just does it with the subtlety of an air horn. * Now cross the border. CGTN's live blog finally produced a number for China's side: "Deadly mudslide hits China-Nepal border, over 550 missing in China." Readers of this site saw CGTN's day-one casualty article — a single sentence, "heavy casualties reported," zero digits, while the tents and firefighters were itemized to the last blanket. So the appearance of "over 550" is genuine progress, and we note it. But watch the sourcing asymmetry: Nepal's dead get precision with a citation — "Nepal flood death toll rises to 675: disaster authority" — while China's own missing get a floor, no names, no families, no survivors talking. Around those two numbers, the homepage is a tech expo: "7 minutes to disaster: Animation traces deadly mudslide." "China releases first 3D imagery." "Drones + thermal imaging: Searching for the missing in Xizang." Everything about the mountain can be rendered. Nothing about the people can be heard. * Why? The BBC answered that question with the best piece of media reporting this story has produced: "Tibet-Nepal floods: Shocking footage isn't being shown in China - and we know little about victims there." Laura Bicker, reporting from Beijing, lays out the machinery: the CCTV footage of Gyirong Port that circled the world has yielded "only a single still-frame shot" on China's flagship state bulletin. On Thursday night, "as global headlines led on the devastation in a Himalayan valley, China's state broadcaster opened its main bulletin with the launch of Xi's new book." A local party notice instructs members to "make every effort to maintain social order and ensure stability and public confidence in the disaster areas." The International Campaign for Tibet — which praised the first responders — is asking Beijing to "disclose complete and verifiable information about the damage and casualties." This is an outlet using its Beijing bureau to report on what its readers are not being shown. That is the job. * So: five ledgers. Nepal's side of the mountain produces messy, public, embarrassing arithmetic — 626 becomes 675 becomes worse, revised in front of everyone, because that's what open counting looks like. China's side produces "over 550," a drone showcase, and a stability directive. The distance between 2,478 and "over 550" is not a rounding error. It's a firewall, and this week you could watch it run through the middle of a single flood.