A fishing boat crowded with migrants traveling from Libya to Italy sank in Greek waters last week. While hundreds are still missing and feared dead, it has garnered far less attention and resources than the Titan rescue efforts for five people.
I'm always skeptical of the idea that people can't handle more than one news story at a time.
So NBC wants to point out that there wasn't much coverage of this issue? Maybe NBC should take some responsibility for not pushing the story harder in the first place?
This is the real answer. Also a tiny sub sinking to the bottom of the ocean possibly with people/civilians still living in it is a lot more unique and captivating situation.
The news covered it and the resources went where all the eyes were. They coast guard and all these people likely had a pretty good idea that they were already dead but they can't just give up and walk away while the entire world is watching. Instead they have to show what all those tax dollars are for. If 5 migrants ended up sinking to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine in the same situation I think it still would have had the same response.
However, if you put 500 Billionaires on a boat and it sank, we would throw a party.
Sadly its not "new" and is a story we've all heard every season for most of our lives. The story isn't viral because the tragedy. Its viral because how unique the tragedy is.
As long as the Capitalist market controls the vast majority of the news then this will ALWAYS be the case. Capitalism is by default self serving. So it's in their best interest to get the world concerned about some billionaires stuck in a tin can submarine somewhere in the ocean, over hundreds of refugees drowning.
Yeah it seems pretty ridiculous for a new network that's been pushing coverage of the Titan to complain about this. Why not just cover the other story, then?
Maybe if the media and journalists didn't waste the last 30 years engaging in "is climate change real" and both-sideism. But apparently it's the entire scientific community's fault that they didn't word it any better. Definitely not the publications' fault.
Compared to story about yet another ship carrying illegals that deliberately sank, it is not that often that you hear about a "homemade" submarine that disappeared somewhere near the Titanic. And, in this case, it is/was a race against time to try and find the submarine, therefore we see frequent updates in the news.
Understandable that a race against the clock (that I think they've most definitely lost) makes for more novel news, so I'm not surprised that it got more coverage. It's also very fair to be angry that five billionaires on a pleasure trip are visibly more important than 400+ poor. "llegal" people are still people and they suffered and died the same in an effort to live safely, which literally everyone wants.
There's nothing in this article or others I found that suggests it was deliberate, either. It seems to have been an accidental capsize.
It’s easy to see this as a parallel to the value our society places on human lives of different societal classes and nationalities. But I also think the sub story has so much traction because it’s an ongoing story with a fight against the clock, where there’s a, however small, glimmer of hope.
The boys stuck in the cave in Thailand a while ago weren’t overlooked either.
A kid that falls into a well is interesing. The 200 starving people in the village around that well is not. Anyone could tell you which is more tragic but that doesn't align with our interest on reading about it/helping.
There's also the massive scandal over the fact that the submarine was not safe at all and should never have been used for manned missions, making it something of a leopards at my face moment. This has made it emminently memeable, so people are talking about it even more.
A boat sinking on its way to Libya is definitely more tragic, but also not nearly as unusual or attention grabbing. No sane person is about to make memes about a few hundred dead migrants.
Nah, it’s a shame that you have to commit atrocities towards your fellow man to accrue that wealth and there’s rarely any justice over it. I’m not going to be shamed for celebrating when justice is doled out.
Instead of also pushing for this incident to get a lot of solo coverage, many people talking about the billionaires coverage in relation to it. When you mention the submersible in relation to the capsized boat, you are now also talking about the submersible.
Please just focus on the capsized boat if you want people to focus about the capsized boat. Don't bridge the two incidents together if they aren't already bridged together in the conversation. Connecting the two incidents just keeps looping the submersible story back into the mix. The discussions have changed to talking about media bias instead of talking about how to stop people from regularly dying on these boats.
People will pay more attention to this if it's its own story. "What about" tends to get poor coverage and media attention.
Again, this whole discussion in itself has changed to be about media bias instead of about the people who actually drowned. I don't disagree that the focus is mainly on the sub, but I also haven't seen anywhere near as many posts about the capsizing on lemmy. I think I may have seen more posts about the media bias than the capsizing, to be honest. We should all should fix that specifically, instead of just talking in circles around it.
The news stations should focus on some of the individual people that this planet lost on those ships too, not just the large number of deaths. Personalization helps many people connect to news stories which is something that the capsizing posts are sadly unable to achieve. It's terrible, yes.
The main irony to me is that the overall focus is still not on this capsized ship, but is instead now on media bias.
I don't think that's the only aspect. The submarine story was novel and unique, with an element of racing against time. And extremely, extremely heavy irony. Was it as tragic though as the migrant boat capsizing, killing tons of people? Absolutely not. The sub was an interesting novelty. The migrants dying in a desperate situation is a tragedy.
It's horrible, but mundane tragedy doesn't register as interesting. I want to know about it and how we can prevent it in the future, but that's not because I'm interested in it. It comes down to interesting not being the same as importance. People want to hear about and read interesting things. News media is going to cater to that, because that's where the readers and viewers are.
Don't get me wrong, it's still awful that we've given far more media attention to what's killed far fewer people. I think if we want to fix this though, we need to ask ourselves why we find the sub more interesting and understand why. Maybe we won't be able to fix the discrepancy in interest, but we can at least make ourselves aware of it and make a concerted effort to pay more attention to mundane but more important things.
I think that is because the sub incident had potential to have a happy ending....for at least 5 seconds. Also it is linked to a popular tragedy.
Whereas the people dying on migration and human trafficing are inherently horrible and its just depressing to read about it.
From where I'm sitting, it looks like these mass drownings are to the EU what mass shootings are here in the US: an issue that the people and politicians pretend to give a crap about, and then do absolutely nothing about, so it keeps happening over and over again.
It's not like they want the refugees to actually make it into Europe lol. And believe me most people living in countries that get most of the immigrants and refugees don't give a shit about what happens to then either.
They're a parasite on society. I don't know why people care so much. In contrast, it's really tragic in every way that the migrant ship had to even exist.
While I generally agree, I think people are getting too hung up on the fact that the missing crew are all wealthy - that's not really the point.
It's a fascinating story because we are dealing with a potential (albeit at this stage incredibly unlikely) deep-sea rescue of the sort that has never been attempted before, at depths that only a handful of craft are capable of even reaching, and we know that time is quickly running out.
Then you have the angle that the company that runs the expeditions is alleged to have ignored early safety warnings about the vessel's ability to reach the extreme depths as advertized, combined with the CEO's application of the "move fast and break things" technocratic mentality to deep sea exploration.
Even if the occupants of the submersible were regular joes, or even (at the risk of sounding crass) refugees, it would still be a attention-grabbing news item.
There is some sense of, I feel like justice isn’t the right word, irony? that the pilot is the founder and CEO. Since his mentality may be the reason for his demise.
Sucks that 4 others are likely to lose their lives too, but they ultimately signed the waiver and assumed the risk. Just a crazy and tragic situation.
Migrants drowning isn't entertainment unless you're a sociopath.
Millionaires and Billionaires slowly suffocating in a little tube at the bottom of the ocean because they wanted to spend their money on something pointlessly dangerous just for bragging rights?
Make some popcorn.
News as news doesn't sell advertising dollars. If all you want is information about what's happening in the world, we used to get that in 1 or 2 hours a night. Back then they'd only need to go back to the story if there was new information.
Now there are organizations dedicated to spewing "news" 24x7. That's not news, that's entertainment. Once it becomes entertainment, it's not about the information, it's just about keeping the focus on what keeps eyeballs glued to the screen. Right now, that's dying rich people.
Hell, I doubt there is ever a time when the majority of people on earth don't want to watch rich people suffer and die.
Oh awesome rich people suffocating?! Sum aint right with your take. I think its mainly because fucking everyone knows titanic and recognize the deja vu of this incident
For what we have spent on the search for 5 people we could have re-homed all 500 refugees on the ship off of Greece.
I’m just waiting for someone to point out that if we were to save and rehome the refugees, it will just encourage others to take unnecessary risks. Because I’m going to point to the multi-country, $10M/day search effort and ask whether or not Billionaires expect to get bailed out if they take unnecessary risks.
There is also a factor of rich people's loved ones having the same assess to news broadcast platforms and can raise awareness faster.
You and me are going to drown out at sea and we might get a mention from our loved ones after the fact.
These guys though, they know the friend of the sister that works at the BBC, they know the mother of the tik-tok enthusiast who has like 1.3 million followers. It's essentially a giant mega phone they get to blast from contacts.
There is also the reward factor, as immigrants rescued at sea have nothing to give, in fact some people have to explain to their superiors why they wasted resources in such a case.
But you save 3 billionaires and 2 multimillionaires from a metal coffin, and you bet there is a reward for that. Not only from a cut of the inevitable book sales/movies that would take place, from being seen as the heros, and if these five were super grateful, I imagine a $$$,$$$,$$$ reward too. Even if it is just their bodies found for their loved ones.
One is a tale of hubris with pretty well defined details. The other is a gross mass tragedy with political undertones and cultural nuance that is hard to parse for normie news audiences.
They are simply biased towards publishing news that people want to read. The simple truth is that nobody cares about the 200th overcrowded boat sinking in the Atlantic because the criminals running the human trafficking operations do not care about their passengers' lives.
I'm not sure about who this article is criticizing exactly. It's not like we don't know about the sunken boat - we do. It's just not as interesting as a lost submarine.
If there was a kid lost in the atlantic on a inflatable unicorn nobody would be talking about the submarine. That's how our attention works. 5 people is more interesting that 200 people and 1 person is more interesting than five.
For me it’s a lot less about the number of people, and much more about the circumstances of the story. Boats have been capsized for as long as history itself, but when was the last time a submarine went missing? And then all of the shady details about the CEO and the company’s ignorance to safety are rather interesting to hear about as well.
It's not just people missing. It's the efforts of the various organisations around the world that have put huge amounts of effort into finding them when they could've saved a lot more (hell 1 more is a lot more) had they focused on larger disasters.
But because the victims are Arabs and refugees, nobody cares.
The submarine going missing was a multi day tragedy where it was a race against time. In the end, we found out the people had died immediately, but nobody knew that originally. Had we all known that the submarine had imploded immediately, it would also have been a non story.
I agree that not all people receive the same amount of attention but I still argue that if it had capsized and there was people trapped inside then people all around the world would rush to help. There arent that many vessels capable of doing this kind of stuff so when they're needed all available ones start heading there immediately no matter whose in trouble.
5 billionaires go missing. 5 nation's coast guards jump at the chance to save them. How many of the 500 would be saved if they had not gone looking for dead men? Could it be said that 505 people are dead because some rich asshole wanted to play James Cameron?
I hate to say it, but a boat-load of illegal migrants capsizing is... normal. It happens so often it's not unusual. And you can't solve it. The crappy situation that forced these migrants to leave on a super sketchy overloaded boat is much harder to solve than, say, banning tourist dives at the Titanic wreck.
Bullshit. It's pretty goddamn easy to solve - they could have rescued those people any damn time they felt like it, but they didn't. They literally had a Greek coastal vessel shadowing that ship for hours.
But they will spend billions searching for these five "upstanding members of society" - that they will do.
The root cause of migrants fleeing their countries by any means necessary, like overloading a boat, which happens far too frequently, is not easily solved. You could easily argue that billions are spent on attempting to mitigate migrant issues on a yearly basis too, yet overloaded boats still keep killing dozens of people every year.
Half the attention on titan was people making fun of billionaires for being so used to buying their way out of problems that they didn't think bad things could happen to them so honestly if were gonna break down social reactions to these two events Its gonna have to take into consideration a lot of factors.
There was a show years ago called "Not The Nine O'Clock News" that was broadcast on the BBC. It was a comedy show that was REALLY heavy on satire, both about the government of the day, and British society in general.
One of the sketches was a news report about a disaster (I think it was a plane crash?) and it started "A plane has crashed in the Mediterranean Ocean, and here is a list of the casualties in order of important -- three Britons, two Americans, three French, seven Spanish, four Australians......" and well you get the idea.
Does it really surprise you that forty years later not much has changed?