2y ago

Sunken boat killing hundreds overshadowed by Titan submersible coverage

www.nbcnews.com A tale of two disasters: Missing Titanic sub captivates the world days after deadly migrant shipwreck

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.

World News @lemmy.ml

www.nbcnews.com /news/rcna90336

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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?
- Also worth noting that there's no further story to the migrant ship. It sunk and people died. There is no ongoing search.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- I doubt the person who wrote this article gets that much say in which stories NBC publishes
- Right? I watched one youtube video about this sub, and now I'm getting flooded by recommendations about the same story. Most of them are NBC clips.
- 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?
- Reminds me, there was an article on the hill which blamed messaging from the scientific community to rising sea levels:
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230621075834/https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4057045-catch-22-scientific-communication-failures-linked-to-faster-rising-seas/
  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.

Does anyone else see the irony of these posts?
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.
- Please just focus on the capsized boat if you want people to focus about the capsized boat.
  The story is about how news media focus on certain topics over others. It's using the Titan submersible and the Libyan disaster as examples for it.
  The money, time and effort to save the Titan submersible has been huge, whereas the same effort has ignored this incident.
  People will pay more attention to this if it’s its own story. “What about” tends to get poor coverage and media attention.
  There have been articles about this, they don't get any traction nor do they get sympathy because of the people on board the boat.
- I like this

Yeah but one of those was good news and the other one was a tragedy that killed hundreds.
- And good news are worth spreading while to tragedies one pays respect. Anyway, it's a shame that level of disparity in assigned resources.
  
  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.
  Nobody should cry for Hitler either.

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.

Well obviously some human lives are more important than others /s

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.
- 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.
- Maybe it's human nature that more unusual peril gets more attention.
  
  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.

Capitalism is for the rich
- My coworkers are talking about the submersible and not about the boat.
  BUT
  They are talking about the submersible in a fun way, they are laughing at a bunch of people dying because they are rich. All of them know that the Mediterranean Sea is full of corpses, one more boat or not.
  Capitalism want to sell news for clicks, and african people dying in the sea isn't something new sadly.

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.

Something that happens every other week isn't news anymore. It's normal there

Surprise! Awful shit happens every day and you don't hear about even 2% of it.
- Lately it seems like we're only hearing about the 1%
- 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.

An article about how "this tragedy was ignored" isn't a good look when you're the pricks writing the fuckin articles what ignored the tragedies.
Even now, the submarine story is at the top of NBCs webpage. They want it both ways.
- I think it's fine for this particular journalist to bring attention to it, even if it reveals the outlet's ongoing bias.
  
  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.

Rich men playing stupid games and winning stupid prices. I don't understand why they're getting so much coverage.
- I understand.
  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.
  
  This is like Steve Bannon level of edgelord opinion
  
  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
- Because that's more interesting 🤔?
  
  Because lionardo dicaprio
- Rich people gonna rich.
  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.

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.
- I think that is because the sub incident had potential to have a happy ending…for at least 5 seconds.
  You realise had the same time and effort been used to rescue the people from this incident, many more lives could have been saved right?

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.

People going missing in the Mediterranean is old news. That one guy did it for like 20 years.

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?

Imagine how many yachts those billionaires on the Titan own. Imagine how many people you could save from capsizing and drowning with those.

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.
- Normal people do stupid shit that gets them killed all the time

it may be that certain news corporation executives are pushing one story over another because they identify with one tragedy, where as another tragedy is meaningless.

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.
- Pretty sure they're called refugees.
- 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.

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