“It’s war in Ukraine.” Thursday it dedicated youth news his full twenty minutes to the Russian invasion. All over the Netherlands, parents listened with their children to an explanation that laid the foundation for countless conversations at countless bedsides, later that evening.
Presenter Joris Marseille looked serious into the camera. Gone was the meek cheerfulness with which daily news is divided into manageable portions most evenings, around seven o’clock. Some current affairs are hard to fit, every now and then there is news without a sun, no matter how often you walk around it. Then it is best to summarize everything as briefly and clearly and as little panic as possible. “Bombings, air raid sirens, army vehicles and completely destroyed buildings,” said Marseille, who then spoke with correspondent Kees van Dam, who talked about children in Kiev who took books and crayons with them, because it was of course very boring if you had to spend hours in an air raid shelter. to sit.
Certainly in war images there is a tendency to reduce children to unwilling victims, to pathetic creatures in the arms or by the hand of their parents, with colorful backpacks with ears on them that contrast with the gray of the world around them. In the youth news children are not just looked upon with compassion; they are listened to. To Davy, who made a video call with his grandmother in Ukraine, or to Elise, who went to school in Ukraine, but has been staying in the Netherlands for a while and told how she missed her school books, and her classmates of course.
Elise: ‘I want them to be safe, for us to be safe and for everyone to be safe and for Putin to stop as soon as possible and for normal life to resume and for nothing to be on fire and nothing to happen.’
It’s been pointed out many times before, but with every calamity that makes your ears tingle and your eyes dart in so many different directions that your vision threatens to become clouded, you are reminded once again how clever it is. youth news does what it does, how it speaks children’s language without becoming childish for a moment, how it makes children serious interlocutors without squatting. Those who have fewer words at their disposal will formulate more carefully, more directly. Every now and then things go wrong – such as when Poland briefly appeared on the map of Europe on Saturday in the place of Belarus – but be forgiven a program that has contributed so much to children’s and adults’ understanding of what the heck is going on for so long. all happens. And at the end, in the midst of all the despair, there is a photo of a couple of children who have discovered ‘the perfect climbing tree’.