NOTEBOOK
There is a frequently cited adage in journalism: if one person says it’s raining and another says it’s dry, the job of the journalist is not to just regurgitate ‘both sides’ but look out of the window and determine which one is accurate. While this has struck me as simplistic and not really applicable to most stories worth telling, it is particularly perilous to the reporter covering the weather and climate beat.
Any journalist who has been assigned to report on science and the environment would, at some point, have reported on the annual summer monsoon. To the newbie, monsoon means the end of summer, messy roads, and the R.K. Laxman cartoon of the soaked-to the-sandals meteorologist and the only one in the room without an umbrella. In due course, these perceptions become the monsoon reporter’s mantras: “When will it rain? When will it stop raining? Why does our monsoon department always get it wrong?” A senior meteorologist once gave me a two-word, all-encompassing answer: “It depends.”
