• Zarxrax@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • MercuryUprising@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Also worth noting that there’s no further story to the migrant ship. It sunk and people died. There is no ongoing search.

      • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Guy_Fieris_Hair@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • reubendevries@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

    • leosa@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • e-ratic@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Cruxifux@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yeah but one of those was good news and the other one was a tragedy that killed hundreds.

    • assa123@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And good news are worth spreading while to tragedies one pays respect. Anyway, it’s a shame that level of disparity in assigned resources.

      • Cruxifux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • assa123@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Me neither, my point is that this (small?) redistribution of wealth is the good news (and worth celebrating!).

  • obsoleted@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • ANGRY_MAPLE@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Naryn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ANGRY_MAPLE@sh.itjust.works
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        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.

  • tomdenhagen3@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • beefcat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Willer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Naryn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

    • Lemmy is Just Reddit 2.0@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The insane and yet very relevant thing from the Greek migrant boat sinking tragedy that I don’t hear talked about is that all of the survivors were men and all of the women and children that were on board, hundreds of them, presumably died because they were forced into the lower compartments! Wow what a coinkydink that their lives weren’t valued as much as men’s in basically theocratic societies that view women as second class citizens.

      Sometimes you need a reminder that the “women and children first” rule that was famously implemented on the Titanic came about by a ton of women and children dying at an disproportional rate.

      • nahida@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think the women and children were below deck for protection against the elements, not to increase the chance of men surviving. On top of that, men are also more likely to know how to swim than women and children.

    • CookieJarObserver@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Yeah i actually think the addition to the titanic exhibition is worth the coverage, they haven’t gotten new stuff for like a hundert years now!

  • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • SomeDude@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

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

  • 𝔼𝕩𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕒@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • ijeff@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s fine for this particular journalist to bring attention to it, even if it reveals the outlet’s ongoing bias.

      • WhiteHawk@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Shaded Cosmos@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Naryn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • NeZha@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • MuadDoc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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