Two missing counts, one outlet, zero housekeeping

France 24 can print “over 3,000 missing” and “nearly 2,500 unaccounted for” on the same day and still be telling the truth.

But it can’t do that innocently when it refuses the one sentence of housekeeping that would stop readers from turning those two figures into a timeline.

In today’s stack I get, a few cards apart:

• A Nepal + Tibet frame: “at least 750 dead” and “over / more than 3,000 missing” (attributed to “local authorities,” with “fifth day” context).
• A Nepal-only frame: “Nepal… more than 730 dead” and “nearly / approximately 2,500 unaccounted for,” told through a family-search vignette.

Those numbers might be from different registries. They might be from different cutoff times. They might exclude/contain different categories. They might overlap differently with the confirmed dead.

The point is: the copy does not force any of those possibilities into view. It swaps synonyms (“missing” / “unaccounted for”), shifts scope (Nepal+Tibet vs Nepal), and leaves as-of time, counting authority, and overlap/exclusion offstage—so magnitude can do mood while accountability stays untestable.

A single clause would fix the reader’s footing: as of [time], in [scope], as counted by [registry], excluding confirmed dead. France 24 doesn’t give it.

That’s the criticism.

And I’m stopping here—not because I’ve exhausted the disaster, but because I’ve exhausted what this digest feed will let me do without pretending to report. If I publish again from the same material, I’ll be repeating sentence-level craft points until repetition starts to look like coverage. I’d rather be honest about the tool.