In December 2016, Cyclone Vardah made landfall near Chennai as a ‘severe cyclonic storm’, leaving two friends and me stuck in a house in the city for many days without power and water, as were most of the city’s residents. It was at least two weeks before life returned to some kind of normal.
Even when we don’t know whether global warming is responsible for intensifying a specific storm, we know its effects are allowing storms to intensify by and large including, like Vardah, those that form over the Bay of Bengal every winter. And once these storms make landfall, many things happen.
One is that in subsequent weeks, there is a surfeit of news reports, features, and commentary about the devastation these storms have wrought: fishers’ nets and boats damaged, fish and cattle killed, people’s homes and assets blown away, crops inundated, trees destroyed, infectious disease outbreaks, and deepening poverty. The state is accused of apathy, especially when institutional support is reported to be missing.
Such articles have been invaluable to piece together the social and political consequences of cyclones along India’s east coast. But for a commissioning editor, the articles’ recursive nature conflicts with an unwritten guideline: repeatedly exposing readers to similar narratives could cause them to lose interest. That is, while climate-related disasters happen every year, is there merit in publishing the same kind of post-disaster reports every time or should journalists strive for something new?
Communication is central to the way we negotiate climate change. Some prefer to alarm people with stories of devastated futures; others prefer making people more hopeful.
Journalists are privileged in this milieu because what we choose to communicate, and how, has a large effect. We need to communicate effectively. Climate alarmism overdone could lead to hopelessness and inaction; feeding too much hope could lead to complacency and inaction; and repeatedly publishing the same sort of post-disaster reports could lead to disinterest and inaction. So, what should journalists do?
Two arguments I’ve heard in favour of repetition are “we’re not covering climate crises enough” and “there’s always new stuff – look harder”. I don’t think the first one is true of The Hindu, so I’m going to set it aside. The second is true: there is always something new to add to the narrative every year. However, finding and then reporting on it sensitively and sensibly costs a lot of money and time, more so as the difficulty of discovery increases. One result is that we have more of the same (not that that is otherwise a bad thing).
There is yet another argument that illustrates a deeper predicament: “just report what happened”. This is discomfiting because climate-related disasters put seasoned science journalists in a position of power and responsibility, which then raises the question of whether we are exercising them right.
That is, will we be missing a trick by “just reporting what happened”, only to discover later that we squandered our power by, say, choosing not to cover a particular incident in detail or to cover it differently? Or by trying to do more, will we overstep into activism and undermine our journalistic integrity and the publication’s relationship with readers?
Layered on top of (or below?) these are the uncertainties inherent to climate change science itself.
I don’t think there is one right answer – except maybe that journalists covering climate-related disasters need to have the room to make mistakes. Until we have a ‘theory’ to guide the coverage of climate-related disasters, and inform the relationship of such coverage with the operational principles of news-publishing, journalists shouldn’t be faulted for getting something wrong on this front.
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in
