De Nederlandse journaliste Anneke van Ammelrooij werkt en woont een groot deel van het jaar in Bagdad. Voor de Iraakse krant ‘De Nieuwe Morgen’ schreef ze – in het Engels om later in het Arabisch te vertalen – onderstaande column over het Nederlandse ‘komkommernieuws’, een uitdrukking die in Irak onbekend is.

The summer is a boring period for journalists in Holland. The government is on holiday. Half the laborforce is on holiday. Schools and universities are closed. Television channels repeat old films and programs. Many companies and institutions are shut down for weeks.
Life doesn’t have much taste for journalists, who need heavy car accidents on jammed highways, bank robberies, extremely bad weather and, above all, conflicts: resigning ministers, men killing their wives, youth gangs endangering supermarkets, muslims angry about cartoons.
How do Dutch journalists survive the summer period which they have dubbed the ‘Cucumbertime’?

They could do all kinds of useful things for which, they claim, they have no time during normal months. An investigation into the Russian mafia in Amsterdam. Counting Iraqi refugees in twelve provinces. Produce long interviews with very interesting people. Learn a new language such as Arabic and read our newspaper.

But alas, no, they don’t do such things.
What they do is bringing ‘cucumbernews’.
This is news that would never had hit the 8 o’clock television news or the front page in normal times. But the media need to fill the gap, they say, created by the lack of action in the country.

Examples of this year’s cucumbernews are ’94-old Australian grandmother gets her Master degree’, ‘Icebear Knut in Berlin Zoo less popular’, ‘Two students improve world record traveling by train’, ‘Laptop thief arrested thanks to video on internet’ and ‘Belgian man throws away winning lottery card worth 130.000 dollar’.

What struck me this year is that the ‘cucumbernews’ wasn’t much different from the daily news on websites such as Yahoo. The American version of Yahoo excels in world records and every week there is news about a gene or hormone that makes people overweight according to scientists. News is about why people fall in love or how they can earn better salaries. The life of movie stars is just as important on Yahoo as the war in Iraq.
There is not much study about how citizens deal mentally with highly important news sandwiched between cucumbernews, for instance: ‘Turkey attacks Kurdistan’ sandwiched between the ‘Belgian man throws away winning lottery card worth 104.000 euro’ and ‘Two students improve world record traveling by train’.

But I have to tell you here that Mister Goebbels, the former German master of media propaganda, invented the idea of having loudspeakers in shopping streets playing happy music all day – to sandwich news about the war and other basically unpleasant news. Suddenly in the middle of a love song and cute snow flakes, news would come of a new German offensive against Stalingrad. The point of doing that was not to make people immediately forget the important news, but to let them swallow it without much mental resistance and critical questioning.

More than sixty years later perhaps we shouldn’t care too much about cucumbernews in cucumbertime. The whole year all important news is floating in oceans of rubbish news, especially on the much applauded internet. That is why nowadays even a new war and the end to wars go sometimes unnoticed, although a war is the ultimate evil and although everyone says he loves peace.

In 1989, a colleague of mine at the Dutch national news agency didn’t notice the moment of the actual Fall of the Berlin Wall – which signalled also the end of the Cold War. After a few minutes telephones started to rang to warn the agency that it was missing a historical event. Also, the editor in chief had ‘forgotten’ to send a reporter with photographer to Berlin. That was 1989. Nowadays nobody might notice the first robot bomber in history entering the skies of Iraq or a new mass wave of citizens escaping Baghdad. A banana of one meter long on the island of Tuvalu is just as important…

Where is Tuvalu? you might ask, if your hobby is bananas or islands. But not: what will happen to a half empty city of once six million people? That would mean that you can ignore the banana and all other such silly news items and that you can think, that you imagine, that you have questions and that you want answers.

Go and try to find them somewhere. No chance.