Inattentive

I tend to avoid following the news very closely. Mainly because I can get away with it; neither my job nor other aspects of my day-to-day life require me to keep up on current events. A vague understanding of how the news media works as a business and a general sense that keeping up with the news is a poor way of maintaining a positive outlook on the world don't help. Be that as it may there are some stories that there simply isn't any getting away from; they dominate the headlines for a time, and so even a limited news diet will result in encountering a fairly substantial amount of information about them.

The sinking of a fishing trawler laden with migrants attempting to reach Europe was one such story, even though details were always in short supply, so the coverage, at least as I encountered it, tended to focus on the personal stories of the survivors of the sinking or the families of those presumed dead. So was the disappearance and rescue efforts associated with the OceanGate submersible Titan. Now, while much as been made of the level of coverage given to the search for Titan, OceanGate Incorporated is a local company, and that may have amped things up for this media market.

In any event, it's now become fashionable to compare the level of coverage, and thus "attention," that was devoted to the two stories. The general gist of things is that governments and rescue services put much more time, energy and effort into the search for the wealthy passengers of the Titan than they did for the women and children who went down with the unnamed fishing trawler.

The front pages the past few days have been dominated by the search for the missing sub, said Josie Naughton, co-founder and CEO of Choose Love, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization supporting refugees around the world.

She said thousands more articles appeared to have been published about the submersible than about the migrant boat, “yet, it’s 100 times as many people who are feared to have lost their lives and these people, they were forced to flee their homes, they were looking for safety.”

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

Whether Ms. Naughton's assertion is true, I have no idea. I'm not that good at Google. But I do understand that it's a testable thesis. From time to time, I encounter a story that deals with the number of news stories that have covered a particular event over time. So why not check out that statement, and see if it holds up? Of course, some context would be needed, while I'm not sure than anyone is keeping a specific count, there are perhaps some 20,000 news sites in the world. If a tenth of them published three stories about the search for the Titan, and only two about the fishing trawler while everyone else remained balanced, that's "thousands more articles" right there.

And this points to the problem with asserting that one story or another has received more attention than another story deemed important. How is that measured? Accusations from activists and campaigners notwithstanding, the two stores are not an apples-to-apples comparison. Sure, one can make the point that the resources deployed to search for the Titan should have been deployed to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean, but Coast Guards are national resources; they aren't controlled by the United Nations. It's unlikely that the United States Coast Guard could have made the crossing in time to do anything other than look for bodies. And to say that the Greek response should have matched that of the United States is to presume similarities that are unlikely to hold up.

Was the response to the trawler full of migrants all that it could have been? Based on the limited information that I currently have, I suspect not. But if there is objective fact there, then the information to back it up should be made available. It can be pointless to ask people to do better when the scale that they're being graded on hasn't been shared. Phenomena like Missing White Woman Syndrome have been documented over the years with a number of studies, and a news story on the topic can be reliably expected to lay out the findings from at least one of them.

If this a case of the world caring more about some people than others, it should likely fit into a similar pattern; one that can be demonstrated. Being able to present the evidence is the first step towards creating change.