this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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[–] Naryn 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] assassin_aragorn 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.