The weather is never neutral: Then and now

Abstract

Reporting on the weather may seem at first glance to be a very light story, but it can actually be a serious reflection of how we see ourselves and our changing perception of the world. In 1996, the author embarked on a light-hearted survey of 23 daily papers to find what New Zealand newspapers’ weather reports said about their attitudes to the world. In the middle of the 2020 COVID lockdown he re-ran the survey to see what had changed.

Keywords

• Australia
• Cold War
• COVID-19
• New Zealand
• Pacific
• weather reports