The top story today, repeated on many English-language websites across the globe, was: "Polish thieves steal van with 12 coffins inside." Last week, every newspaper website had the thrilling story that the world's narrowest house had just been built in Warsaw. A short time before that, the global media machine endlessly repeated the revelation that an exorcism magazine was to be published in Poland.
As exciting as these stories may be, they are hardly representative of the important events going on in this country. There is, for example, a deeply divisive national debate going on about in-vitro fertilisation that much of the world would find fascinating and that provides powerful insights into the political course of a major European nation. Instead, readers are treated to articles about the death of a giraffe in Łódź.
News editors around the world appear to have taken the decision to treat Poland as a source for those, sometime-funny-sometimes-sad, quirky stories you see at the end of the evening news on television. Google returns 10 million results for 'Poland world smallest house' – it returns 700,000 for 'Poland IVF debate.'
Even more astonishing is the fact that only about half of the Google Alerts for 'Poland' I receive each day are about news of any kind from Poland. At least a third of them are obscure financial reports to the effect that BZ WBK's share price is down by three percent. There is always, and I mean always, one story about Auschwitz. The rest of the slots are taken up by stories from small towns in Wisconsin called Poland. Is it really the case that Google cannot fill a single page with stories in English about the actual country?
What can Poland do about this regrettable situation? Unfortunately, not much. It is up to the rest of the world to realise that important things are happening here – things that will have a lot more to do with the long-term future of Europe and the European Union than anything going on in Germany or Greece.
In the meantime, I suggest Poland continues to construct quirky buildings to ensure that the stories that do make it into the global news are at least harmless. There is plenty of scope for development – world's shortest house, world's widest house, world's tallest giraffe house etc. Then the people of Poland can get on with building their nation in peace.
Jamie Stokes
