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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Well obviously some human lives are more important than others /s
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.
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.
Capitalism is for the rich
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.
Surprise! Awful shit happens every day and you don't hear about even 2% of 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.
Lately it seems like we're only hearing about the 1%
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.
Coming from reddit you really had me in the first half, I felt my blood pressure rising dramatically until the last sentence.
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.
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.
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.
People going missing in the Mediterranean is old news. That one guy did it for like 20 years.
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.
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.
Pretty sure they're called refugees.
Something that happens every other week isn't news anymore. It's normal there
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?